Think about something you have worked on over an extended time period, something that made you proud. What made it feel like an accomplishment? The result or the amount of effort that went into it? Some level of both? Today is a big milestone day for me, and I am feeling an outsized sense of pride for it. Tonight is the one thousandth blog post since its inception. I have posted every single night except the night of the big surgery a year ago (and I enlisted a guest author that night to chime in for me to say I was okay, just drugged out of my mind and unable to string together words into sentences). At first the schedule was just about the discipline of doing it every night. The purpose of my writing was to share my home life with the man while he was living abroad, able only to come home for the one vacation about halfway through the 19 months he was gone. I took a lot of pictures of the garden and the pets, and every attempt to share the inner workings of the Park was a year-long public love letter to my man, in the hopes that he'd continue to feel connected from the other side of the world. The longer he was gone, and the more my world went to shit with disasters, spider infestations, illnesses, and deaths, the more I needed the nightly confessions to keep my own head together. I clung to it as my lifeline, my tiny shred of sanity while the world around me burned.
I took many opportunities to plumb the deepest recesses of my memory, to document my personal history for my children before it was lost forever. I admitted to many weaknesses and mistakes. I made a point of finding silver linings when I could, and constructive lessons when I couldn't. I never missed the chance to make fun of myself. I indulged in oversharing, especially when I could pair that with cat pictures. I opened every door and window to my life, and I don't regret doing that.
I've had plenty of nights I didn't want to write at all, but I made myself do it without fail. Occasionally I ran really late, not getting published until well past midnight (and the tardiness is sometimes reflected in the dates on those posts). Some times I didn't know what I was going to say until I was halfway through the first paragraph, and for every time it seemed random and rambling to me, there were at least two times that I surprised myself at how everything seemed related and coherent. I'm so proud of the work I've done, and I freely admit to being hopelessly addicted to this nightly reflection. I wonder how the next thousand posts will go. Tune in tomorrow to see where they start.
No comments:
Post a Comment