I know I should keep writing here while I find my way around the natural evolution that happens in blogging. Sometimes when you feel yourself and your words taking on a new direction, well it’s hard to navigate that. It’s like weaning myself away from, well, myself. Sort of. It’s hard to just slowly do it as I continue to write my blog daily.

I’ve been journaling a ton lately, which has been incredible. More song lyrics have been coming to me and I think backing away from the blog a little bit has helped with that. I need to just blog when I feel the words come to me and not blog just to have a post up a certain number of days a week. I know consistency weekly is a “key to blogging success”, but it’s just not working for me. I know I touched on this in the last post a bit, but I have to say that it’s been good for me. I have lots of plans in the works, a little change in direction and hopefully including a whole new look for the blog soon. All very exciting things. I’m excited.

I finally feel like I’m starting to come into my own. To be okay with who I am and not trying to adopt from other people pieces of them. If that makes sense? I’m like a sponge. I soak up little habits of other people that I admire. That’s fine, that’s how we can mold ourselves into who we are, but I was doing that too much, you know? I was not being who I was for fear I would look like a fool or a fraud, so I saw qualities of others I admired and I tried to adopt a few of their traits. Not a huge amount, just little things here and there. But they added up. Funny how I was afraid to feel like a fraud, so I tried to be more like other people. Oh, the irony. I would look at others and think “hey seem to get approval, so if I act like them just a little bit more then I will too!” It’s scary to admit that out loud, but I know there are more of us that do it than admit it. I’ll admit it. I’m finding my way through that, finding my voice among the masses. Realizing more and more that I will not please everyone and that that’s okay. I am not responsible for how people respond to who I am when I’m being myself. I can’t please everybody and will run myself ragged if I try to. I can only be me and as long as I am kind and stay true to myself, then that’s all that matters. That is what is really going to make all the difference in the world.

Sophomore year of high school for me was the best of those four years, but also a difficult one. I mean, turning sixteen is tough. First love, first heartbreak, first loss of a friend. It was a roller coaster of a year. I remember walking out to my mother in our living room, bawling my poor eyes out and trying to get out the words I was feeling, which was hard enough to do at the time. I remember being so sad, SO sad and all I could manage to get out was “I don’t know who I am”. It was a rock-bottom moment for me. Unfortunately, it would continue to take me another 9 years to start to be comfortable with who I was. To start to figure it out finally. To not be afraid to say what I want to say, what I need to say. To not be afraid to look like a fool.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that this is all coming a week before my twenty-sixth birthday. Words can’t describe how excited and ready I am for this next chapter. I’m still getting there and I’m always going to be a work in progress, but it’s about time. It’s really about time.