An insight into me, myself and others

It is a known fact that we are generally more critical of ourselves than we are of anyone or anything else. Well, I am no exception to this. And the older I get the more I have noticed this about myself, and I have found it has started to impede my life - in terms of happiness, and also in terms of actually having a life, which I currently do not.

Even now, as I'm sitting here writing this I keep going back, auto-correcting, editing, constantly going back to fix what I've said, to make it better, convinced that if it isn't perfect it'll make me sound like a babbling idiot. There was a time when writing came much faster and easier for me. I can remember sitting in grade 11 English class, assigned to make a children's book for my grade 1 reading buddy, and faced with the task of coming up with the story board. And I was stuck. I don't write from a structured outline like that, I just start writing, and the story comes to me as I work through it. Or at least it did.

As I worked my way through the end of high school and into the beginning of university I became more and more concerned about how people saw me; what were they thinking of me by the things I said and did, the way I acted etc.? I screened everything carefully, and thus turned myself into a side-liner, and not always a happy one at that.

Looking now at the people I admire most, the people who, in my mind anyway, have happy, full, engaging lives, are the way they are because they don't screen everything they do and say. Now granted, at some point everyone will say something they immediately regret, will think "I should have thought about that before I said it" that's just a fact of life. But for the most part, as it has been told time and again, just being yourself is more important.

And I am a writer. I can't help it, it's inside of me. There are too many thoughts in my head at one time; big thoughts, worldly thoughts, philosophical thoughts. They have to come out. And like most writers, I wanted all my thoughts to be shared with others. Not everything, some things are just too personal to share with anybody, but some of my bigger questions, my ponderings and musings. That's where this blog came from: a way to share my thoughts in a manner that others could see. And then a few months later I stopped because.... well really, I was 15, who knows why I did anything!

But then talking with a seasoned and wise woman in my family, and an experienced blogger herself, she inspired me to start again. Because I'm not writing this to be analyzed by others, or to be judged. I'm writing it for me. There is no "right way to do it." If there are big gaps, if it doesn't look like other blogs, that doesn't matter. That's not what's important.

While in high school, I found that every year I learned one major valuable thing about myself that enabled me to grow up, and change and adapt into adulthood. Well, here's something else: I'm not done learning yet. There never comes a point in a life when there aren't new things to discover, about the world or about yourself. I am a writer, and I do it because I want to, I need to and I enjoy it. I want others to read what I have to say, and eventually become known and loved, but for right now, doing it just for me in my own way is good enough.