Holding Myself To A Standard

 Hey!

Even though I talked about it a lot in the first post, I wanted to keep writing about why I'm writing this blog. Obviously, my motivations were pretty clear: keep a consistent writing schedule and practice my comfort with long-term projects. But in reality, this is just the first big step for a larger plan for myself to become a better version of myself.

For a long time, I wasn't really happy with myself as a person. Not in a "hating myself" way, but rather a "hating the way I currently am" way, if that makes sense. What bothered me isn't my core, but rather what I was expressing about myself in terms of potential and presentation. I hated how lazy and unproductive I was (and I suppose still am, for the moment). 

A lot of this frustration came out of my perspective on myself as a writer. For as long as I can remember, I knew that writing and English was what I wanted to do with my life, since I first started writing short stories in my first grade class, stapling and folding pieces of paper to make my own books. The best part of writing was always watching other people read and enjoy what I wrote, and it gave me a sense of fulfillment that I had been lacking at the time, since I wasn't particularly great at anything else, if I'm being honest.

However, I had noticed that slowly but surely, I had stopped sharing what I wrote. As I passed through middle school and then high school, I found myself keeping what I would write to myself rather than sharing it with others. This could've been because of a myriad of reasons; I could have been insecure, selfish, or even embarrassed at what I would write. But what mattered was that I was still writing, even if only for myself.

This kind of stopped as soon as I hit college. I was so wrapped up with adapting to my new life, making new friends, and enjoying my newfound independence and freedom that I lost track of my passion for writing. For months, the most I would write would be my own personal journal entries that I kept for mental health reasons. But suddenly, it appeared that my creative writing output had dried up.

As soon as this became apparent, I felt terrible. I had thought I had lost my passion for writing, or worse, lost my ability to write like I used to. For a time, every time I would sit at my desk to try to write something, I couldn't last more than 30 minutes because I'd get distracted or frustrated by my writer's block.

I think that's why I feel such a drive to pick up writing now... More than anything, I want to prove to myself that I'm still capable of writing like I used to, and even though this isn't a creative writing avenue (I suppose blogging is, in a way, creative writing though) I think I feel better already writing about whatever I feel passionate about. Maybe I don't have many meaningful things to say, and maybe people won't really care to read about my thoughts and blog posts. But it really doesn't matter- at the end of the day, this was, and always will be, for me.