I remember the fear I had the day I shared my first “real” blog post.
I remember where I was sitting (in the living room of the house I grew up in) and I remember wording and re-wording my little Facebook post announcing I was starting a blog, staking my flag in the ground as if to say, “I’m here now!”
I was in my early 20s at the time, wrestling with all the lovely early 20s questions of identity, career & purpose, and starting a blog gave me this tiny sense of youthful hope and freedom. It gave me a little island all my own in the giant sea of the world.
But I remember feeling like such a phony— who am I to share my writings? Who even cares? I knew I loved to write, and I knew what felt good to write, but still, I wrote something else instead and put my island into the hands of Others as I sought kudos and approval, hoping some positive feedback would help the phony feelings dissipate.
Spoiler alert ➡️ shockingly, it did not work.
It turns out I felt phony because I was actually being phony— mimicking the styles of other writers I admired instead of trusting my own voice and writing from a place of pleasing others instead of pleasing myself.
In this way, my writing became so externally focused, and truthfully, it usually felt like trying to write versus needing to write most times I posted.
And the thing about the kind of writing I really like to do is, it feels best when I’m not trying.
The kind of writing that is most satisfying— like that moment you finally scratch that hard-to-reach itch on the back of your shoulder blade— is the kind I can’t not write, the kind where the words start to write themselves in my head before I can even get to the keyboard and I am frantically trying to lasso them via voice note or a quick text in my phone.
That is the kind of writing I like to do, the kind of writing I want to do, but also the kind of writing I never thought I could do, because I didn’t know where I would put it or if anyone would read it.
And so I wrote the very early (now very cringe) version of “the line,” and it was fine.
And then I stopped writing the line and I wrote in instagram captions instead, and I wrote in my journal and in the Notes app in my phone and in any other crevice I could cram my words into, until I made myself come back here again.
At the beginning of this year (2022), I challenged myself to write one blog a week, and though it felt compensatory in the beginning— a student forced to stay after school and write lines on the blackboard— eventually I found my rhythm again and blurred my own lines of the line, as I tip toed every so slightly outside of my original intent for this blog.
And so now here we are,
nearing the end of 2022 (what? 🤯), and I am ready to step outside the confining lines (that I created) of the line altogether as I relax into a writing that feels so much more me than I could feel between the boundaries of what the line started out as.
She was great. She was fun. She led me here, after all. I’m proud of her!
But we’ve outgrown her, and it’s with a relieved, grateful, and optimistic exhale that we say goodbye.
Many things have changed in the years of the line, but my subconscious commitment to authenticity has hardly wavered.
It is not a value I consciously seek to uphold, and yet the moment things feel misaligned, my heart intuitively leaps to my throat as it closes, as if not to let any inauthentic words escape, and signals flare inside my brain.
The signals have been flaring here for months.
“Who I am” (and who you are, too) is as static as the ocean waves— which is to say, not at all— and I project this next iteration of my writing is just that: another iteration as “who I am” continues to evolve, and I continue to honor that evolution.
For those of you who’ve been around since the beginning: thanks for reading.
For those of you who’ve been around since the real beginning— I’m talking “writing on the walls and taping angsty poems to my bedroom door” beginning— thanks for always giving my writing a place to go.
Cheers to her new home, lawless and rule-less, feel-good and free, Outside The Lines.