NaBloPoMo – and happy blogiversary to me

Because I didn’t have enough going on in my life, I have gone insane and decided to join up with the NaBloPoMo crowd.

NaBloPoMo is National Blog Posting Month, a blogging addict’s answer to NaNoWriMo where people even crazier than I try to write an entire novel in a month. Each year my facebook feed fills up with friends attempting it, and each year I watch as the updates dwindle as the month goes on. A novel in a month sounds like an incredible exercise, but November is also the busy season for crafters, so it was never even a question – I could no way no how join in.

In NaBloPoMo the task is a little more approachable. Instead of a novel, you write a post every day for the month. Every day. Including weekends. Like today. It sounds both easy and impossible at the same time.

I honestly cannot say what compelled me to play along this time, I still have my ready made excuse of being a crafter during the holidays, but it just seemed time. Believe it or not, I kind of don’t but I just checked, I have been blogging here for seven years. 7 YEARS!! The first year of my archives has disappeared into the internet and it is better left that way. Whether it was some migration issue or if I went in and deleted them myself in a shame filled spiral, I cannot possibly guess. I will say that any time I venture too far back into the archives I want to set my whole computer on fire, so that spiral is looking pretty good to me.

But I no longer want to set my computer on fire when I read what I’ve written lately, and since the goal of this blog in the first place was to keep me company while I was drugged out of my mind on pain pills and to help me get the discipline to be a capital W Writer, I think I may have achieved something in all that time.

I got through those pain filled years, I can now produce writing that doesn’t make me scream in agony, I’ve met amazing people, gotten through a whole bunch of other crap, been given opportunities, accidentally wound up with a freelance journalism career, achieved major goals, recorded every step of this twisted and rocky road I’m on, and I figured a few dozen things out.

I know my voice now. I know what I have to say, what I’m an expert on, where my talents lie. I know what I have to contribute to the world. I had been blogging for AGES, before I really knew what I had to say. I mean a good four years. Those early posts are a random collection of philosophical musings, attempts at humor, book reviews, infertility talk and whatever else could make it through the fog of tramadol in my brain. I want to go back and smack myself upside the head, but I didn’t post the stuff I made for years. Can you even imagine what this space would look like now without the stuff I make? It’s a marvel anybody hung in there with me.

That’s what I tell myself when I go to a blogging conference and listen to experts who have been blogging for a measly three years, or watch someone start a blog and find major traffic just a few months later. Bumps in traffic and recognition ultimately aren’t why we all do this. There are better ways to get fame or notoriety. We do this in part because we want to write, but there are other avenues for that too. We blog because we want to share, and in the sharing, we discover. Truths about ourselves, the lives we’re creating, the relationships we cherish. We figure it all out, publicly, and we tell ourselves about it just as much as we tell anyone reading.

I have seen a whole lot of blogs come and go in my seven years. I have seen a whole LOT of blogs launch and get enormous while I type away with my tribe of dedicated readers. But there is always more room at the table – it helps that it’s virtual – because the reward is not just traffic and ad revenue and the occasional bit of free crap. The reward is an examined life. One that is joyous, and improving, and very much worth living.