The biggest mistake any blogger can make is to be unclear on her content, or to leave the reader unsure as to what message the content is trying to deliver. Is it about yoga? Makeup? Travel in the mid-West? The psychological benefits of knitting sock puppets? Be clear with your message, bloggers are warned, or the readers will ditch you. Now for me, with the exception of a few close friends, I don’t have readers yet. I’m aware of it, and I’m working on it (it’s harder than it sounds). So for now this blog merely serves as a creative outlet for me.
Franz Kafka (fellow introvert) once said that a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. Aptly said. And after only a week, I can say with a clear heart that this blog is preventing me from turning green and smashing up my neighborhood. I want readers. I need readers. But until I get them, I am simply grateful for the venue.
So let’s return to content. As I click from post-to-post, the message seems clear to me. But I wonder if it will be clear to readers. What is your blog about, Mary?
Well. Ahem.
I suppose it’s about abandonment. Not abandonment of values, principles or children, but of restraint. Moderation. Self-control. Even of the invisible shackles of geography.
It’s about giving into one’s natural impulses.
It’s about a widow moving towards love once again. An introvert moving away from self-imposed privacy. A daughter, mother, teacher, professor, moving away from solitude and stereotypes and wanting to know how her intelligence, sense of humor, beauty and sense of self translates to the rest of the world. It’s about a spoiled self-indulgent little girl discovering gratitude. It’s about travel, and culture, and fluidity, and men, and sex, and conversation and laughter.
It’s about happiness.
Uh-oh. Major journalistic faux-pas. I buried the lede.
You know now. I’m happy. Really really happy. Not the over-bearing bubbling-over, small-talk chatty kind. Not the Facebook post “Look how happy and perfect my life is!” kind. No. My happiness is the slow-burning, color-changing kind. The quiet kind, the kind that finds me huddled in dark corners, protective of it and afraid someone will ask me to try and explain it. Happiness that simmers like an ember, deep-down in that place where the self sits, content and grateful. Happiness that is not dependent on other’s opinions of me, or what the weather is doing, or what the scale says, or how much money I have, or if I have a date on Saturday night.
Pure happiness. The kind that scares others, because they don’t understand it. It is unfamiliar because of its rarity.
I will share more on happiness as I go, but future readers, know this: the content of this blog may seem to veer from subject to subject, but the message should be clear:
I’m so happy to be here for the journey.