One year later, part II: Thoughts on blogging.

This is a follow-up post to One year later. , celebrating my one-year “blogiversary”.

My, how things change in a year. Not only has my personal life changed dramatically, not only have I grown as a person, but my attitude toward and approach to blogging have evolved immensely as well.

When I started blogging last year, I was very timid. I didn’t know what the whole blogging world was about, so that made it nearly impossible to find my place within it. Kind of like me and the real world right now, except the real world is far more complicated so it’s taking a bit more time.

I dove into blogging head first, without fully considering what I had to say on my blog. In some ways, I’m glad I did it this way. If I had stood on the sidelines thinking for too long, I might have talked myself out of it.

Once I got going, generating blog posts became a challenge for me. It’s fine to blog about starting a blog, but once you get past the introductions, where do you take it? For me, it was a bumpy start. Individually, the posts were all things I was proud of, but I couldn’t see the common denominator, the thread that tied them all together. So when an idea would come up, I’d find myself agonizing over whether or not that “fit” into my blog.

But what was my blog? It took reading other people’s blogs to find out.

Over the course of this year, I discovered a true love for blogs. I discovered design blogs with pictures that made me swoon, personal blogs written in fantastically defined and individualized voices, and wedding blogs about everything under the sun. I even fell in love with a few “mommy” blogs and became completely addicted to Momversation (conversations on motherhood from some of the Internet’s most celebrated female bloggers). Even though I’m no where close to having kids, something about the way these women think and write is just appealing to me.

Then there were blogs that couldn’t be pigeonholed, kind of like mine. These blogs would throw up everything from thought-provoking essays, to pretty pictures, to poems and personal stories. I came to cherish these blogs and all the others, and my Google reader evolved from this annoying chore I felt like I had to clean up everyday to a finely tuned engine that delivers my news, my inspiration, my daily dose of oomph.

From reading and coming to love other people’s blogs, I realized that my blog isn’t about one thing – and that’s okay. It’s a personal blog, and that label gives me the freedom to really talk about anything I want. If I had to drill down farther, I’d say my blog is about being in your twenties, and all the randomness and identity crises, accomplishments and growth that go along with that decade. At times, it’s been a wedding blog, at times, even a social media blog, and hey, maybe one day, it’ll be a mommy blog, then an empty nester blog, then a crazy old lady blog. Hopefully it will be a 30′s blog, then a 40′s… all the way up ’til the day I croak.

I also learned that the posts that resonates the most are the ones that come from the heart. Simplicity and honesty and just being yourself, as tired as that phrase is, are things that are rewarded in the blogging world – and that in turn is rewarding.

I’ve come to love blogging, and I’ve come to feel comfortable in my own blogger skin. By no means, though, do I feel I’ve “mastered” blogging. Over the next year, I hope to share more and better define my blogging boundaries. I’ve played it pretty safe thus far, steering so clear of certain areas that I think this blog, as a whole, is sometimes lacking a little bit of “me-ness” (for lack of a more eloquent word).

So, I hope to grow. I hope to share more about how I came to be the person I am today, to provide a foundation as the blog grows with me. But most of all, I just feel a supreme thankfulness that I’ve found blogging. I think I finally get it, why so many people are addicted to pushing their thoughts out into the world. The power to develop your own content as you see fit, the lack of hard rules, the limitlessness… it’s exhilarating. And I’m just glad to take part in my small way.