just write.

For someone who doesn’t do a whole lot of it, I sure think about personal writing on the web an awful lot.

I’ve recently started meditating on a daily basis — I don’t know a lot about different types of meditation but something about mindfulness meditation, specifically Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, really resonated with me when I was seeking something to help me deal with the stresses of my normal days, anything to help me to just chill the fuck out. (This has been carefully acronymed in our household as “CTFO” — toddlers are such myna birds!) So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks: chilling out with my breathing and when my mind wanders I gently refocus it back to my breath. That’s it, for at least 20 or so minutes a day. The impossible focus.

I’ve gained a ton of insight about a lot of different things (in only two weeks!), but the one of the biggest knock-me-over-with-a-feather moments was when I realized that when my mind wanders, it usually wanders to the subject of personal writing, writing on this blog, writing for me, writing for you. Funny, that someone who rarely writes about personal things anymore has so many many many thoughts about writing about personal things.

Maybe all of this thinking about personal writing and blogging is because I work on the web. (I run a casual game fan site and blog that garners over a million pageviews in a bad month. I “blog” several times a day every day.) Maybe it’s ingrained. (I’ve had a personal web presence of some sort since 1994 and I’m proud that I’ve had some semblance of an online journal for most of that time.) Either way, what I do here now, every week and every month is a snub to what I really want to do here.

Sure, vegetables and monthly check-ins with my toddler peppered with little tidbits I feel I want or need to share is fairly representative of who I am. My last five posts were: vegetables, toddler, vegetables, my dog died, vegetables. These types of posts just don’t record this life thing in the way I wish they did and boy, they leave out a lot.

Do you know that I quit my career in 2006 and started the casual game fan site I mentioned earlier?

Do you know that I have had intense and sometimes very scary anxiety attacks for years?

Do you know that since 2007 and despite having had a baby in the middle, I’ve lost about sixty pounds?

No? I didn’t think so.

But you should know these things, because these things have shaped and are shaping who I am now and who I try to be for my son and my husband every day of our lives. I should be able to look back on this and have a written record of it, one that wasn’t written just for me. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I want to write and I want to write here out in the open and I don’t want my anxieties and weird hangups to get in the way of recording this life. That’s clearly important to me, forefront of the mind stuff.

I struggle so much with the unfamiliarity of writing personal things — every day I write for my work site and the words just flow. They should: I’ve been doing it for four years. I know my voice, I know my audience, I know what I need to say. In the beginning it was awful and my writing was stilted and sometimes I struggled with every word in every sentence of a tiny short article announcing some new game. I feel that way about this site now. It’s hard to just let the words flow after years of not letting them just flow.

Earlier this week, after seeing a tweet in my timeline about it, I downloaded this Copyblogger podcast to my iPhone. In the episode, Brian Clark interviewed Seth Godin and there were a few minutes where they talked about writing. Now, I’m pretty sure I grabbed the podcast for ideas for my work site (“creating content that matters”), but after I listened to this particular episode, I was surprisingly and completely floored on a personal level (“creating content that matters”).

Around 15 minutes in, Brian asked Seth about how he blogged. He didn’t really get an answer, but about a minute later he gets this gem: Seth said, “Write. Just write. And put it in front of people. If you don’t put it in front of people it doesn’t count. And if you get in the habit of putting something in front of people every single day — even if it’s only 10 people by email — your writing will shift. And you will adopt the voice you’re meant to have.”

That right there summed up everything I’ve been thinking about this week. Seriously, I’m not ready to make promises of daily posts or pictures, but I’m going to find a way to calm those constant wandering thoughts and redirect them back into something I have loved doing all along. Maybe it’s this.

Just write.