Catching up on what is good

A reflection on blogging, success, failure, and clarity

When I started this blog with a daily challenge, I thought it would be somewhat difficult to keep up with. My life felt very full and hectic and busy. I was starting another semester with my eighty-whatever new best friends, and I have young kids. I always had more than enough to be behind on already. I decided to try the whole daily blog idea in part because I thought it might help me be less of a perfectionist.

Every idea doesn’t have to be amazing. Every word doesn’t have to be ideal. I would write and I would let it go. In my more pessimistic moments, I thought it could be something else to be perpetually failing to do as well as I felt I should.

As it happened, I found daily blogging to be easier and more invigorating than I expected it to be. I liked having a small challenge, an achievable task. Other areas of endeavor that I find myself engaged in simply don’t provide much of an opportunity for completion, let alone success. Teaching, academia, parenting—these are long-haul projects full of endless effort, complexity, and balancing. By giving myself a context in which done was good enough, I was able to taste completion and success regularly. Salutary.

After a brief hiccup of pandemic productivity, I hit a wall and let myself stop. That was the only thing to do, even if it may not have been the right thing.

It was certainly contrary to the spirit of the daily post idea but aligned with me personal reasons for undertaking such a project.

I’ve definitely learned something even if it’s not always clear what.

I’m going to keep at it, in a haphazard way, consistently inconsistent, and I’ll see what happens.

The Annoyance of Wasted Effort

Lost Effort

I have wasted writing effort in many ways. I nominate as the most annoying way to waste one’s time writing the experience of completing a document, saving it multiple times along the way in a trusted way, and then having it mysteriously frozen, unable to open, from thenceforth, into perpetuity. I realize that this is far from the most disheartening writerly experience, but for a frustrating pesky irksome tiresome and pointless kind of waste, it is unparalleled. 

That’s why this post is not about what it is like to read too many books at a time.

Weekly posts: a Productivity Pause

As my almost non-existent audience may have noticed, I’ve paused my daily blog project. Here are some possible reasons: Most aspects of my life have become exponentially more difficult, even though my immediate family is well, for the most part still employed in not-front-line occupations. First, remote work is, for me as a teaching-focused faculty member at a suddenly fully remote institution, very difficult. I’m not just doing my regular job: I’m doing a much more frustrating, more exhausting, and less satisfying job. Next, our regular childcare situation is of course not functioning. It is literally impossible to do the full time childcare and child rearing while doing the full time other job.

But the more important reason that I’ve paused my daily blogging is that I am in a processing phase. Posts I’ve written or started feel irrelevant in this moment, and it’s hard to know what feels relevant.

I’m processing a new reality, and I’m deliberately removing the daily post project from my to-do-list. I don’t want this project to be just one more thing I need to do. So I’ll be posting, but probably weekly. Maybe when I’m not trying to do too many things at once I’ll be able to do that more effectively and efficiently.

Because an unexpectedly high percentage of my posts have been about tulips, I’ll wrap this up with this: after a hard frost last night, the tulips were frozen and drooping. They thawed. The perked back up. They look a bit wilder, a bit burnt around the edges, a few petal bent back prematurely, but not less spectacular.

2/100 I’m not a blogger and this is my blog (part II)

Whenever I order a vegan meal at a restaurant or buy a huge cart of only vegan things at Trader Joe’s, someone asks if I’m vegan or just vegetarian. The answer is actually neither. I’m an omnivore who likes vegetables. And tofu. But that is neither here nor there. 

If people often see what I eat and think I must be at least a vegetarian, they discover what I’m interested in, and think I must be at least an occasional blogger. I’m not. Or at least I haven’t been. 

I could blog about far too many interests—I’ve considered everything from gin, curly hair, and mysteries to the English language, higher education, motherhood, and intercultural family life. What that wide range of disparate interests means, in practical terms with regard to a blog, is that I can’t actually blog about any one thing. 

My plan for this 100 post challenge is to explore some of the blog ideas I have entertained in the past. I’ll start with some meta posts and shift into actual experiments. One day I might write about a gin cocktail or a curly hair problem, another I’ll consider a word or idea from some area of my life. To potentially prevent sheer chaos and confusion, I’ll use the framework of exploration, making, and reflection. Along the way, I’ll reflect, and I’ll make changes. Maybe I’ll take up meme-production. It’s more likely than Twitter.

1/100 I’m not a blogger and this is my blog (part I)

I have surprised people many times by admitting that I do not have a blog. Over the years, as blogging has emerged, thrived, and developed, I have been asked: “Why don’t you have a blog!?” This is not a serious question, as I have learned by attempting to answer it. I do, as it happens, have a few lists of reasons why not to blog. 

The top of one of the lists is that I don’t have a personal brand. I have some lists about that too, but that’s for another day. What I do have is some self-knowledge. I know that I consistently come back to three things: I like to explore, I like to make, and I like to reflect.

1. Explore

I like to explore— to read widely, go to new places and bring new perspectives to favorite places, immerse myself in rabbit holes of research, and go on adventures medium and small. What of the larger adventures—wandering with no cellphone along a street thousands of miles from anyone I know thinking “I could get lost and disappear forever and no one would figure out what happened”? At this point in my life, with my best efforts, I can’t disappear for five minutes. My work email and my kids are always onto me. But I can develop my curiosity.

2. Make

I like to make—to bake, cook, doodle, arrange, build, art, and craft—sometimes in a straightforward way and others in a way particular to me and my life. I bake bread, for example, and cookies, and I build unrecognizable conceptual playgrounds out of my kids' toys. I doodle for three minutes while my students write.

3. Reflect

I like to reflect—through conversation, writing, and reading, as I look at a tree, a sunset, a painting. And as I consider the number of dishes produced by a simple meal and ask myself if it was worth it, given that no one wanted to actually eat the product of my efforts. In fact, on the back of my mind much of the time, I am asking whether it, whatever “it” is, is worth it. Somehow, even though the answer is often a resounding “probably not,” I am trapped into “it.” What does always feel worthwhile to me is to reflect, even when the result is disheartening. 

I realize this is all very not-suitable-for-branding, but as my grandmother often declared, giving the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes in Hamlet the weight of the scripture that many mistake it for, “To thine own self be true / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Act 1, scene 3).

So I’m not going to try to be brand-ready. Instead, I’m going to try out a range of ideas as I’m taking up the challenge of posting to this blog daily for 100 days. (Sort of. More on that later). This challenge came to me from my brother, Lucas McLaughlin, at http://lucasmclaughlin.com where he is in the midst of Artworking, a 100 day challenge of his own.

I asked for advice, as he’s several days ahead of me in the challenge, and with a far more developed personal brand. “Find your niche,” he said. 

I believe this advice to be excellent. The problem I’ve consistently run into is that I can’t find a niche.

Maybe I secretly don’t want one.

And maybe this blog can do some of the work of developing my space, a niche for myself that feels right.