Does anyone care about blogs anymore?
Aren’t they passe?
Shouldn’t I be podcasting, hosting a room on Clubhouse, or awkwardly dancing my way through Tik-Tok?
(I can hear my teen daughter begging me not to do that…)
I’ve always been somewhat behind the times. I started the Commander-in-She blog five years ago. That was at least ten years after blogs had become a thing.
I was late for the game. And when I joined I didn’t bother following any of the rules.
I had no real plan of what I’d write about or how I’d get people to read it. I didn’t identify a niche. I didn’t use keywords to land on page 1 of Google. I had no strategy or goal in mind.
It was all kind of pointless.
And also exactly what it needed to be.
I wrote because I needed to get the words out. I was at a stage in my life where I was questioning how I spent my time and who I might become if I could get over the notion that there was one right way to do it or some “me” I was supposed to be.
Also… I had this crazy visual in my head that if I tripped and fell on the sidewalk, I’d break apart and all of these nouns and adjectives would come spilling out of me.
Nuts, huh?
I simply needed to write. Starting a blog gave me the outlet to do that.
So I wrote. A lot.
I wrote about burnout, about breaking up with your job, about feeling like a mess.
I questioned why we were chained to this idea of advancement, why women weren’t nicer to each other, why we weren’t nicer to ourselves...
I wrote about other women’s next chapters, about how to tell your story, about why you shouldn’t go through life afraid to make a big splash.
And along the way, I noticed a lot of things that had meaning to me, metaphors for life which is why there’s a blog about discovering pockets in a dress, a ladybug I found in the bathtub, an eagle I saw that was not at all an eagle.
That anyone would read it was an after-thought — a thought that filled me with fear.
What if they didn’t like it or made fun of it or (gasp!) found a typo?
I didn’t have to worry. Most weeks I’d see about 12 clicks on my article. 11 of those were my mom re-reading my work.
I kept writing.
I wrote simply because I wanted to. It made me feel good.
And if something I wrote occasionally connected with someone that felt great too.
But I have to admit, I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.
I’M Not 100 Years Old. My Blog Is 100 Posts Strong!
I celebrated with cake the day I reached 100 blog posts. I’ve topped 160 now. I’ll probably have cake again when I hit 200.
Because the point of having cake is to enjoy the cake (duh).
Some days I re-read those early posts. I find a typo and I cringe. Then I get over it.
There are plenty of typos I didn’t catch. I’m sure there’s a typo or two in here.
So why do something if it’s less than perfect? If there’s no point?
It took me 140+ blog posts to realize THAT IS THE POINT.
The doing is the point. The process of having no other agenda doing it because you want to. The pride of looking at a finished product.
What is that thing you’d like to do but you don’t because you’re “too busy” doing everything for everybody else?
If I had given thought to the point of the writing or whether it was strategically set up to appeal to eyeballs, I likely never would have started writing.
Now I can’t stop. Blogs may be old-school but I’m going to keep writing.
Because I want to. Because it makes me feel good.
What about you?
What do you want to do simply because it makes you feel good?
What’s that thing you want to do but you don’t because you feel it should be more worthwhile, more purposeful, more relevant?
What’s that thing you hold yourself back from because you think you’re not that good at it and your inner narrator questions, “What’s the point?”
Do it anyway.
Just do it.
There’s positivity in that pointless endeavor.
You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to have an end goal in mind.
So throw that pottery, pick up that pickleball paddle, start that draft of the book that’s been in your head.
The only purpose you need to have is to fulfill your desire to do it.
Do it because you want to. That’s the point and the purpose.
Oh, and thank you for reading my blog…
