This year I’m committed to putting myself out there more with my writing. This blog is and has been such a wonderful and important personal project, and now feels like the right time for the next step.
For the past four plus years since I started blogging, I’ve published a monthly post here on my website and that was pretty much the extent of it. The posts generally went live with little fanfare. Some I actively shared with one or more friends by texting them links, but even that was kind of rare.
All of this was by design I guess. The whole point of this blog has been for me to write about things that interest me, and to date most of it has been about personal stuff, including deep feelings that I’ve carried around for a long time. The act of writing about them, clarifying my thoughts, describing the little details, has been extremely helpful. It’s allowed me to better understand myself and also work through some things that have been holding me back. It’s been therapeutic and amazing honestly.
The personal subject matter has also made me hesitant to actively share it. Being vulnerable can be hard, even if you’re just admitting things to yourself. It can be much harder when you’re opening up to others. I struggle with this reality, because when I think about it, I don’t think it should be hard to just be yourself, to declare your thoughts and feelings and passions, to do whatever it is that makes you happy. The world is rough out there though, and oftentimes it feels like judgment comes from all corners.
But the fact is this personal, vulnerable stuff is what most interests me to write about right now, and this includes my formative experiences, my hangups and insecurities, and my dreams for the world. Writing helps me figure these things out, at least to the extent they can be figured out, and I’m drawn to exploring them. I actually feel blessed to have such a clear direction with my writing, but the downside is that the sharing part is difficult, at least for me.
That being said, the act of publishing the posts on this blog has become a really important part of my process. It creates the conditions for me to really push on a monthly basis to write something that’s good enough for me to be okay with it being publicly accessible on the web. Putting them out there has also made it easier for me to put out the next one. It can be terrifying to publish an honest piece in which I make my thoughts and feelings known, but the more I do it the more I become comfortable being myself and fully owning up to what that means. It’s liberating, and I feel much more free and confident as a human being today than I did before I started blogging.
And now I’m at the point where I’m ready to share my writing, at least some of it, with more of the world out there. I want to actively connect with other writers and readers too. I’ve also written enough posts (54 to date, this is my 55th) that I now have several pieces that I’m quite proud of and that I think are worthy of being shared more widely. Many of the posts I’ve written don’t make me feel that way, but there are probably ten or fifteen that I really love, and I consider these my “best of” posts.
So my plan this month is to start publishing these “best of” pieces on Medium, which is a web platform where writers publish stories and articles for what appears to be a good and supportive community of writers and readers. But before I do that, I’m planning to refine them to the point where I’m truly excited about sharing them. My writing continues to improve the longer I blog, so I’ll revisit each of these posts and edit them, improve them, polish them. Some might need a light touch whereas other may end up being edited quite a bit. Either way the goal will be to make them as good as I can at this moment in time before posting them on Medium.
As a father of two with a busy work life and home life, I can only give this project so much time right now, so my current thought is to post a story on Medium every other month. This will be in addition to my regular monthly blog posts here. I’ll continue to re-evaluate as I go and see what happens.
The first story I’m publishing on Medium is “Slide shows from way back then,” which I first posted here in June of 2021. It’s a little shorter now, tighter, better. The original post will stay the same as it always was on this blog, so there will now be two versions, the original one and the new, refined version on Medium. I like the idea of keeping these two versions out there as it will document for me how I’m evolving and growing as a writer.
I’m so excited about this! It feels like when I first decided to put myself out there and start performing solo music about 15 years ago. I confronted the fear and realized one of my lifelong dreams. I also grew tremendously as a human being and ended up performing consistently for years.
So here it goes: you can find my first story on Medium here.
Thanks again for your readership and support!