When I first decided to start this blog, I told myself that it would just be an enjoyable exercise, a way to process some of my past experiences and work on my writing while reflecting on issues I deeply care about.
And that is all true. Except for the “just”.
I’ve only been doing this for little over a month, and yet I’m experiencing some feelings that I didn’t quite anticipate.
There’s more anxiety than I expected. Some of that may be related to it being winter in the Pacific Northwest, a time of year where I tend to struggle a little bit more with feeling balanced. But I know there is also a component of vulnerability, of putting my words out there, that makes the ground feel a little bit more unstable.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I happen to deeply believe that fear is necessary for growth. If doing something new doesn’t scare me, it’s not out of my comfort zone, and I’m not learning from it.
But it’s also interesting to analyze how quickly I started to think about page views, and metrics, and all of these supposedly “objective” markers. Trying to determine what it means when one post gets fifteen views, and one gets five. And realizing how much I still rely on external validation for so many things.
At which point, I have to pull myself back, and question – why does it matter? Whether something I write is read ten times, or one time, or even none.
Because none of those metrics can tap into why I chose to do this in the first place. The fact that writing, even for this short time, has been helping me deal with the chaos of the world. That I’ve been getting more creative in other aspects of my life. That I can feel the growth happening, even amidst the pains that come with it.
So for today – why do you do what you do, whether it be your job or a cause you believe in? How important is that external validation? How do you gain your own sense of worth with what you create?
