Too Overwhelmed To Come Up With A Good Title

• December 5, 2016
• Real Shit, Uncategorized

You know in interviews when the interviewer asks what your greatest weakness is and you’re supposed to say something that is actually a positive like, “I’m a perfectionist who exceeds all my goals because I work 80 hours a week?” My answer to that question is actually a flaw with no positive spin. When I’m overwhelmed, totally and completely overwhelmed, I just become paralyzed and don’t do anything I need to do.

Fortunately for me, I’ve learned how to manage this negative personality trait at work and at home. When phone calls need to be made or meetings scheduled or the house needs to be cleaned or animals fed I can identify what the next step is and take it.

Turns out, I can’t do that with this blog. I’ve had so many things I want to write about in the last month and a half that I haven’t been able to write anything. I have half a dozen drafts started and abandoned and nothing posted. I want to write about the President elect and the political climate, I want to write about how we are adjusting to being a single income family, I want to write about the bombings in Aleppo, I want to write about holiday traditions, I want to write about my recent decision to get a therapist- and my consequential avoidance of my therapist.

Words have always been how I process the world. But right now life is so overwhelming, I have so many feelings about so many things, it’s like I can’t settle my brain down to find the words I’m looking to. They’re all swirling around inside me and I’m grasping at them but I can’t catch hold of one idea long enough to haul it to the surface.

Of course, the other component to this is that while I write because I find it fulfilling, I’m not just writing here for me. This blog is where I release my words to the world. Some writing is meant to be given a life of its own. (Also, every once in awhile I write something that is pretty good and then people tell me how good it is and then I feel good about myself because Words of Affirmation is my love language and I’m done apologizing for that.)

When I set out to start a blog I poured over articles about how to be a successful blogger. How to build a core base of loyal readers who would share my words with their own networks so they spread through the internet like wildfire, until eventually I got a book deal and wrote a best seller and then got a talk show and then became a motivational speaker and an activist and was also paid way more money than most speakers or activists. (Because money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy horse feed.) Every article- and I mean every one of them- said a key component of building that base is blogging regularly.

This translates to me getting even more overwhelmed the longer I go without a post because obviously this is costing me a best selling book and a talk show. (If anyone wants to negate this fear and just give me a talk show now, that would be great. I have a lot of opinions on a lot of things and I would be happy to share them.)

The good news is that we have recently agreed to do a product review on some awesome cloth diapers, so I will be blogging about our week long experiment with using them sometime this month. I’m a little skeptical of diapers we have to wash, but excited to try something new- and to have something to write about!

There’s no good way to wrap up something so pointless and rambling as this post, so I’ll leave you with some cute photos of Ellie Jo. Thanks for sticking it out through my radio-silent crazy phases, ya’ll.

Do it all with love.