The Blogging Blahs

Last night I was almost asleep, when I suddenly remembered that I hadn't blogged yesterday. So I groggily stumbled over, typed something up and went back to bed, grumbling the whole time.

That's been happening more and more, the blogging not because its fun or I have something to say, but because I feel obligated. I scrolled through the last month or so of posts, and even I, the person most narcissisticly interested in my life was bored.

I didn't originally intend to be an everyday blogger. I'm not really sure what I intended on accomplishing when I started blogging. I just liked reading other people's blogs, and felt it was only fair to expose myself a little. Still, initially I only blogged sporadically, no one really read and the whole thing started to feel like a waste of time. So I decided that for one month, I was going to blog every single day, just to get in good habits. But after one month, why not two? And then, why not six? Until suddenly I had a goal of one full year.

I haven't missed a single day of blogging since February and have a little under 5 months left to meet that goal. It was great at first. It was good to have something forcing me to think and write. I would pen posts whenever I had an idea, anxiously planning when to publish them. I even started doing things beyond my apartment partially so I could have something to say. Best of all, and somewhat unexpectedly, my blog started to be a place of actual interaction with some amazing people I consider friends. I felt better about myself. I had something concrete I had made that I could look at and tell myself how funny or insightful I was. I had comments showing up in my inbox to tell me that other people thought I was awesome.

Those things are all still true, but so often I feel like I have nothing to say. So the clock ticks by, next thing I know it's time to go to bed so I freak out and throw some words onto the internet to keep up the trend, not because they have any value. It's even leaked into reading blogs, something I've loved for years. Now I get stressed out if I think I'm not commenting enough, or well enough, or if my G-reader gets backed up. Like I've failed at my half of the blogging covenant or something. I want it to be, it should be, about friendly interaction, but more and more it's not. I don't like that something that has made me so happy now feels like an obligation. 

I'm still going to finish up my one year goal. I'm still glad I'm blogging, its been a big deal for me these past couple of months. But at some point I need to figure out how to get back to why I like doing this. I don't know if that means being better organized and having a pile of posts pre-written for blah days or trying to figure out how to do one great post a week and not stress about the rest, or something else entirely. I don't have answers right now. But one of the whole points of this blog is to just talk to people honest and open, so I'm going to count this as a post in the right direction.