In which I ramble on, hate on myself, and decide to do NaBloPoMo anyway

The thing about writing is that I really, really love it.

And also, I totally and completely hate it.

I mull over things in my head, I turn them over and turn them over until I hear the words start to fall into place.  I sit down at my computer and click clack click clack heave it all onto the screen in front of me.    I watch the lines lay themselves on top of each other and want to reach out and touch them on the screen, to pet them and tell them they did a good job.  For the briefest of moments, I take a deep breath.  Things make sense.  All is right with the world.  My mind and my heart and the universe outside are all in alignment.

And then I hit publish.

And then I go crawl under my coffee table for a while.

I rage at the universe.  I get an uncharacteristic amount of laundry folded.  I sulk and I pout and I ponder throwing my computer out the window.

And then, for reasons that escape me, the next day I do it again.

I have a marble notebook.  (Clearly.) I have a lot of them.  I use my words to process.  But this space, this space is for something different.  It's for connecting.  It's for being out in the world.  And the world?  Sucks.  It's scary.  It's dangerous.

And this isn't me whining about not having enough readers or enough comments.  Not at all.  Sometimes I wish that more people were reading, that more people were seeing and hearing and understanding me.  But at the same time, I realize that if more people read there would be more of a chance of people not seeing, not hearing, not understanding.

So this is what I do.  I post and I publish and I sulk.  Every other day I dream about my blog being "bigger" and on the in between days I want to take the whole thing down in a big dramatic fit.

Yesterday was the latter kind of day.

I wanted to take the blog down, in some way that people would really notice (although also in the back of my head I was sure no one would).  I wanted to never write again.  I wanted to wrap myself in a blanket and stop being vulnerable, stop being sensitive, stop giving people and their thoughts and feelings and silence any power over me.  I wanted to stay in my own little world, in my head, and taco punch anyone who said anything about being brave and overcoming your fears and stepping outside your comfort zone (sorry, friends).  I wanted to have a huge pity party and shut out the world and stop thinking that anything about my writing or my blog was important or ever would be.

And then, I saw some people on twitter talking about National Blog Posting Month.  And I thought I want to do that. 

And immediately I thought "Well, that's just stupid."

You'll run out of things to say.

You'll fail.

You aren't good enough.

Nobody cares about your blog.

You'll do it, and nothing will change, and you'll just be disappointed.

And in that moment, I knew I really needed to do it.

It makes sense, I promise.

Shut up.