Sundays used to be the day I blogged. As an ambitious university student I savoured these evenings of carefully crafting my simple thoughts into what I thought were bold and profound statements of clever intelligence.
These days I'm still a university student. I just seem to have lost that same ambition.
If I were to sit down and try to figure out why this old hobby of mine has faded away I could readily come up with a handful of excuses. I'm pretty sure the ultimate answer would be that I needed an outlet to voice my insecurities. Believe it or not, deep down I've always been an incredibly insecure young adult and blogging was my therapy.
I've been told before that one of the reasons Eminem is such a successful rapper is because he threw all of his weaknesses out there. Although I don't listen to his music, I've heard that his rivals and enemies could never get anything on him because he was always the first person to lyrically tell the world all of his insecurities. Which is pretty well the approach I took to my blog. What is there for me to fear if I'm the one in control of and voicing my weaknesses?
Perhaps this approach is viewed as brave. To be honest, it was completely driven by fear. Since I grew up in a small town, I grew accustomed to the fact that my weaknesses and insecurities would eventually be discovered and then talked about by everyone in my sphere. That's how small towns work. And since this terrified me, if I was going to be talked about, I wanted my own words to be what was circulated. Eventually this fear grew into bravery.
So since I haven't blogged much, does that mean that my insecurities have all faded away? No. They're just labelled differently. My weaknesses and insecurities are facts and have been accepted as such. I still work at improving them, they just no longer scare me in a way that they used to. In fact, many of them now make me smile or laugh at myself.
Now where does this leave my blog? Well, in my first year of university, I did a thesis project in a class called "Physical Activity and the Aging Adult." Essentially, my entire project was dedicated to figuring out what the main motivations were for older adults to run. To be honest, my own motivations for participating in this activity were horribly negative (ie. for self esteem, to not get fat, to keep my body in a shape that I could fathom loving) and I was curious to see if this would be something I continued to struggle with for my entire life. It was relieving to see that for the most part the motivation for running changed (ie. for fun, to socialize, to keep fit), but still older adults continued to run. For now, I'm still trying to transition into finding a new reason to blog.