I had this big plan to blog more often this year. This blog, specifically. I was going to give myself schedules. Right now, I should be posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday. When I have a lot to say, it’s easy. I draft the posts, fine-tune them, and they publish at 9am on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Easy peasy.

It’s less easy when I’m not sure what to say. Or when I just want to keep saying the same thing. When I’m afraid I’ve exhausted the only subject I can think about. Then I’m not sure what to say and I begin to wonder why I’m doing this.

It sounds so arbitrary. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s Monday morning, time to spill your guts! An internet confessional a day keeps the loneliness at bay!

Going into this year I was determined to do some things differently. When things aren’t working it’s time to start making different choices. Stop doing the same things you’ve always done and expecting different results. It’s hard when you don’t know what those things are, though. “Do the opposite,” sounds like great advice, but it requires a level of awareness for what, exactly, the broken habits are.

“Write more,” was a command I gave myself a few months back. It’s probably the most significant and enduring of the changes I’ve made. I’ve been writing more, in general, but it’s not entirely the same if none of it is ever nudged out into the world. This space is probably the one that means the most to me.

Every now and then I have strange experiences where I am confronted with some unexpected corner of the physical world reading this blog. I have had several such experiences and they are always jarring. There is always a moment, however brief, in which I want to panic and destroy all of it.

Sometimes I push something out and then sit with eyes closed, baited breath, waiting for catastrophe. It’s never those things, though. It always catches me off guard. Maybe that’s the only way it can happen — it’s only when my defenses are down that I say the things that stir up trouble for me.

Mostly, though, it’s liberating. I don’t realize how many secrets I keep until one slips out and it’s always with a sigh of relief so deep I feel it in every inch of my being. You’d think that would tell me something about which things need scrutiny, which habits need breaking. Easier said than done, of course.

Some days I end up saying a whole lot of nothing. It’s a whole lot of silly nothing and the words aren’t great and the objective is arbitrary, so what’s the point? Except the very fact of having said something at all makes it meaningful. For me, at least, speaking has meaning all its own. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why I feel better or stronger or more complete for having said even the most empty of somethings. I just do.

And I’m sorry for some of the selfishness of that. It exists for me and I write these things for me and the catharsis is for me, but none of that works or exists without you or the possibility of you. I seldom write with an audience in mind, but the relief that surges all the way down to my toes can only come when I’ve said it somewhere that an audience can exist.

Admittedly it’s more about the possibility of you. The possibility that someone, at some time, could see this. Occasionally that relief happens when I write things down in a more private space, like a journal. It can even happen at the first recognition of something. I write or type a thought and suddenly realize it’s true and there’s something exciting and comforting all at the same time in finding that I now know this thing. Sometimes that’s enough.

But to put it here is to eradicate secrecy. Maybe only a dozen people will ever read this, but the mere fact that anyone can read this automatically eliminates the possibility that it is a secret which I must guard. Thoughts and feelings have been given form and are now out there, in the world, for whatever that’s worth.

I feel lighter for it. That’s what it’s worth. That’s the value of that fact. I feel lighter.