the bravest thing i’ve ever done

What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done? That was the topic of the Real Simple Life Lessons essay contest this year.

I’ve only entered one other writing contest in my life. It was seventh grade, and I wrote an essay (it was required) about Frederick Douglass in honor of black history month. There was an awards ceremony and a plaque and a podium. I can’t recall what I wrote and what made it earn first place, but I do remember that the entry pool was on the small side.

I was due to enter another contest. And the pool for this Real Simple contest was, let’s just say, on the large side. I was not entirely surprised when the notification date for winners came and went, and I did not receive notification of any sort. Although there was this little voice in the back of my head that had been whispering, What if?

Since my essay was not selected to be published in Real Simple Magazine, I can share it with you and you can get a little glimpse of what it has been like for me to start and write a blog. Which is, by the way, the bravest thing I’ve ever done. What about you? What brave things have you done lately?

Behind the Curtain

by Kaly Sullivan

It was the worst time to take on something new.  My husband took a new job in a different city.  He moved into a studio apartment in Philadelphia while I stayed behind in our Massachusetts home with our two boys, ages 6 and 7.  I had three months before we would join him. Three months to sell our house, find a new place to live in a city I’d barely visited, clean out and pack up our stuff, maintain a long-distance marriage and did I mention it was baseball season?

So I started a blog. It wasn’t exactly an impulse decision. I had already spent the better part of a year scoping out the scene. I studied blogs about How to Blog and scoured About Me sections of blogs comparing myself to the bloggers that were already out there. Was I clever enough? Savvy enough? What would my blog be about? What would it be called? If I just had a good name. If I just knew a little more. If I just had a better plan. If I just had more time.

I was stalling. I was stuck and afraid. I was very close to wimping out. It would be so easy to use moving as a reason to put it off or to shelf the idea all together. But I’d taken enough yoga classes to know that you have to breathe into the tension – the place where you’re really uncomfortable. That’s where you should be focusing. So with our move right around the corner, I decided to plunge into my discomfort and start blogging.

Every time I hit the Publish button, I place my forehead on my desk and take three big breaths counting – one, two, three.  I push my chair back and walk away from my computer.  I resist the urge to go back and delete what I just wrote. I keep myself busy loading the dishwasher or dealing with laundry. The words that I’ve put out into the world keep running through my head, but I don’t go back and look at what I’ve written. They’re already out there, I tell myself. Just let it be. And then, No one is reading it anyway.

But people do read it. There are people (parents + siblings + a few friends = people) checking in to see what’s going on in my world. If they leave a comment, an email shows up in my inbox. When I get these emails, a warm blush rises in my cheeks and my stomach drops a little.  Someone saw what I wrote. They saw and read what I wrote. The fear of exposure hasn’t gone away. I wonder if it ever does. But every week, I keep on posting.

I started a blog, because I had something to say but I had lost my voice. Somewhere between college and marriage and children and a few stalled-out careers choices, I became unsure of myself. I wasn’t standing on solid ground. I didn’t trust myself anymore. I became guarded and private keeping my ideas to myself. Something as simple as writing a Facebook status made me anxious. The critics in my head scoffing…No one cares! Who do you think you are?

And so I did nothing. I mean I did everything required of a wife and mom and friend and employee, everything and more, but nothing that felt real and right and true to me. I felt unmotivated and uninspired. I was on cruise control watching the scenery go by. And I was terrified of what Toto would expose when he pulled back the curtain. Who was back there anyway? I had lost something big. I had lost what I was really about. I was looking for something to help me move past that feeling. I was hoping a blog would be that something.

But the doubts in my head wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t turn them off. I was so afraid of failing and what people would think and if anyone would read it. And if they did read it, would they think it was self-indulgent and annoying? I took tiny fragments of conversations and turned them into a chorus of why not’s. I don’t have time to read blogs. That market is so saturated. There are already like a million blogs. Are people still starting blogs? Isn’t blogging kind of over? I just don’t understand blogs, they seem to be all about me, me, me.

And it is. My blog is all about me, me, me. It’s about me, and it’s for me. It’s about my life as a work in progress and learning and laughing my way through the situations that make some days feel impossible. It’s about taking every day as an opportunity to notice something new, to find a connection, to fight my way out of old patterns and push towards a life that is true to me. It’s about tuning in instead of tuning out.

I blog about life, and yes, I realize that’s a very big topic. But I’m not a life style blogger. I’m more of a life is happening so you better get it together blogger. I blog about what I’m experiencing as a woman, wife and mom trying to figure it all out. I can’t claim to be an expert in anything. I write about what I’m learning and what I love and what I don’t understand. Some days I blog about the thing of the moment – Candy Crush, Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest cookbook, Pinterest. But most days I’m trying to connect what I see in the everyday to something bigger. I try to write more about how things really are and a little less about how they appear.

When I’m writing and I tap into something authentic in myself, there’s a tingling in my spine and down into my tailbone near the bottom of my gut.  It’s how my body tells my brain – this is the good stuff. I figure as long as my blog follows that feeling, I should be okay.

As we’ve settled into our new life in a new house in a new city, I’m still blogging. Every time I post, I feel my voice getting a little bit stronger. A little more confident.  A little more me. I am finding that sharing is better than keeping it all in. When people tell me what I wrote resonated with them, I think What? What I wrote? I thought I was the only one. My voice, as rusty as it is, is still capable of forging a connection. And that’s the point of all this, right? To feel connected to ourselves and to each other. To feel like we belong. I’m not doing myself any favors keeping myself tucked away for safekeeping. Toto has ripped down the curtain. And there I am standing up and saying, Here I am world. This is me. The real deal version. And this is what I think.