I Blog, Therefore I Am

Actually, it is the other way around. I am, therefore I blog.

I have been struggling lately with what this blog means to me, what purpose it serves for me, and you, and whether I want to continue, or not, with it. Now, now, don't worry too much that I will delete it. That part of me that wants to let it go is very tiny indeed. There is a much larger part of me that just wants to figure out what I am blogging for and to move forward doing that, whatever that is.

When I started blogging, coming up on three years ago next week, it was because I wanted to share with the world the joy of unschooling. I had recently fully immersed myself and my family in this lifestyle and wanted to shout it from the rooftops. You could also say that I was needing to justify our lives with "proof" of how unschooling was "working" for our girls. I made a commitment to myself that I would blog every day and that I would show the world how wonderfully unschooling was going for us. Ha! Little did I know the stress I was going to feel about that! I lasted 29 days, dutifully blogging each of our days, even when we were all sick and nothing really happened worth writing about. Then, I lost it.

I felt vulnerable and slightly disingenuous. I had put myself in a position where I had to prove that unschooling worked, but I had little idea who was reading or what they knew or thought about our life. I felt pressure, self applied I now see, to blab on about something each day to make it look like our days were so full and exciting. The reality was that life is not always that fun or full or fascinating. But I had set the tone for this blog and there was no going back.

I kept it up for three months and then I began to slack off. The fourth month I blogged 5 times. And since then I have never gone back to the every day posting thing. I know I do not want to either, so no matter what I come up with, I am pretty sure it will not be an every day new post kind of blog.

As for the content of my posts, I have pretty much stayed with the upbeat and positive reporting of what we have done in our lives, with a few deviations here and there. I am not sure if that serves me. I know it makes for great memory recording, a virtual scrapbook. But there is pressure to not miss anything, or else it will go unrecorded and therefore lost to us forever. Silly, I know, but what can a perfectionist Virgo do? The fact that so much of our lives in VA so far have not been recorded here in this blog is like nails on a blackboard to my Virgo self.

Sigh.

I think we all have a need to be known. To have the people we know and love to know who you are. To see you fully and love you anyway. I see now how I have failed to let others see the real and full me. Fear of rejection is about all I can come up with as an excuse. I have not shown you my soft underbelly, my ugly thoughts, or my even my not-so-fully-thought-out ideas. It is hard for me to even write this post. I am winging it as I go here, and I have no idea where it will lead and that is scary for me. But, I want to live more authentically, and I know that in order to do that I have to be more real, and not hide anymore.

I want to find a way to be real and to record and to share fully and to make this blog more truly me. I know that for whatever reason I have a tendency to forever seek out and learn new things and to have to adjust my life and who I am based on the new things I am learning. There is no stasis for Miranda. I am change. (Maybe I should be President!)

I would like to share more of my process with you. Not just the pretty package at the end of my searching. More of the messiness in between. I need more practice being unsure, letting myself say"I don't know". It is hard for me to be wrong. I go to great lengths to be sure that I am right about things. This means I am usually someone people look to for answers, but it is also very stressful at times. I'd like the answer sometimes myself, without all the hard work.

It will be interesting where this will lead us. I am going to end this like that. No pretty bow on this package tonight, as hard as that is for me...