Recently, I had a day where I didn’t feel like blogging. This rarely happens. I do not blog every day because someone tells me to. I blog every day because I love it and because I think it is good for me as a person and as a writer. But on this day, blogging felt like pure drudgery. It felt pointless. Meaningless. I didn’t want to do it. But because I am not good at giving myself a break, I blogged anyway. I wrote a short and sweet post about second chances. I meant every word I wrote. I always do. And the post felt good—and effortless—because it was not about me. Boring, oldish me.
One of my biggest fears in life is that I am boring. Truth be told, I don’t think about this fear often. But every now and then I do, and it plagues me. Yesterday was one of those days. I took that impossible step back, I looked at Me and confirmed it. Yup, I’m boring. I emailed Lindsey and said, “I know this sounds weird but I am bored of myself.” She wrote back and said she has felt the same thing before. It is good to know that I am not alone.
I am married, happily married, I have two kids whom I adore, I love my extended family, I am renovating a home, I am shuttling back and forth between school and music classes. Hardly a sob story. These are all wonderful things. I wouldn’t trade a single one of them, but sometimes it all just seems so, well, boring.
And then after deciding that I was the most uninteresting creature on the planet, something else happened last night that underscored how beige I actually am. Lindsey emailed me saying that the article for which I’d been interviewed a few weeks back had been published. Yay! This was surely what I needed to get me out of that existential Sunday funk. I clicked on over to this not-so-shabby institution’s website, to the Styles section which I generally adore, and there was the article! It was a piece, well-written and interesting, on the modern parental dilemma of whether to publish photos of children online.
The article’s author phoned me a few weeks ago to get my take. We spoke for a short time and like a good lawyer, my answers were safe and diplomatic and decidedly unedgy. I told him that my blog, at bottom, is about me, about my rookie career as an author, and as such I have no reason to splash the names and faces of my husband and children on it. I added that I know several other parents and bloggers who have made a different choice than I have, who publish photos and names, or some combination thereof, and that it seems to work for them.
In short, my answer was honest, well-articulated, and safe. And very, very boring. I hung up the phone, relieved that I didn’t say something stupid, that I didn’t let myself get pulled down a path I didn’t intend to go. But I also had a hunch that this nice journalist would never in a million years quote me.
Well, I was right. I read through the article. I got to the end. And I was not mentioned. This did not devastate me. I did not plunge further into the depths. I smiled and nodded. Another sign.
It’s official: I am boring.
But now. Now is a different beast. A better one. Now I see things for what they are. I am who I am. I tell the truth. Despite temptations to garner a wider audience and more links and exposures in national media, I have stayed true to myself (cue the elevator music). I tell stories of my life. I pose questions that echo in my orbit. Nothing more. I talk about what concerns me even if it is inherently solipsistic or indulgent or predictable. So, for now, I vow to promptly forget that one article which wouldn’t have me. I will plow forward with my life, my good life, that might not always make for dramatic material.
