Last month I decided to start writing every, single day on this blog to see what would happen. Guess what happened? People read my blog, every, single day. Amazing! In fact, I broke the 1000 visitors mark in January, which has totally fucked with my head, and now I am incapable of writing anything because I am too afraid people are actually reading what I am writing and what if these strangers (mostly) hate me? AHHHH, are we here again? Never left. This low confidence, this negative self-image, this inability to take myself seriously as a writer is starting to gnaw at me again and it’s causing problems with my real writing too. My “real writing” is what I call the stuff I don’t post here. The short stories, the poems, the flash fiction, the lyric essays, the creative nonfiction, the stuff I submit to literary magazines, mostly. My real writing is suffering because I’m in a bad place mentally and emotionally and I can’t seem to climb out. But my blog is singing! Just got 40 new followers!

Thanks, y’all! Seriously, thank you to all of you who come here daily, or weekly, or monthly, and read the stuff that comes out of my mess of a brain. Thanks for tackling tough topics with me like mental illness, abortion, grief, bullying, my sister’s hair in the 1980s. I really appreciate it. I wish I could meet each of you and buy you a cup of coffee, or maybe a nice Chai Tea Latte? Yeah, sound nice? Let me know if you’re ever in the ATL, I’m around. And I love you.

But what to do about this other nonsense? Well, as you know I have limited my social media time, which has helped quite a bit, actually. But it seems like the less I have to worry about in the “now” the more stuff I just dig up from the past. Who does that?! Like, I don’t have the stress of trying to keep up with the Joneses on Facebook anymore, so I’m worrying instead about how my childhood made me desire to eat carbs when I watch crime documentaries. I dunno, bizarre you guys.

Is this why you come? Do you come to my blog to make yourself feel better about your own life? Cause if you do that is amazing and exactly what this blog should be used for. I can make your life look like a walk in the damn park. And no, not a walk in Central Park in the middle of the night. More like a walk in a nice, new, properly-lit, suburban park outside Fargo, North Dakota.

I don’t know why I tell my therapist that I can’t write stream of conscious stuff, cause this is coming out just fine.

I’m gonna stop. Eat some carbs. Think about life a little. Take a shower. Maybe.

Thank you all for being here.

And I hope this helped you feel more successful today.

This is not a great blog post. You deserve a gift:

That’s me. Sick with the flu. Eating a clam at a place called “The Shanty” in Rhode Island. No carbs! Thanks for the beautiful pic, Beth.

❤

M.