When I first found steemit I was so excited. I thought the site had so much potential and I went on to tell family and friends about it. I remember the first posts I wrote I wrote with passion, the words came flowing out of me and I was convinced that I would enjoy this site for a long time. I had endless ideas of things I wanted to write about, and I opened steemit several times a day just to read new posts, replies and comments.
What happened since then?
Today three months have passed since my last post and about as long time since reading other posts or making any comments. It is not that I do not know what to write about, I still have so many ideas in my head and so many pictures on my computer from some of the travels that I have done in the past few months, and they are just waiting to be shared.
In the beginning I stopped writing because I had too many things to do. I did a wonderful eight day road trip through Californian national parks during thanksgiving week and a couple days after I came back to Long Beach my sister came to visit me from Finland. At this time the semester at the Theater Arts department was coming to an end which meant a ton of work with final papers, scenes, monologues, dances and exams. I had barely no time to spend with my sister who had traveled more than 9000 miles to see me, and even though I wanted to post to steemit I had so many important things I needed to get done first. I decided that I would start blogging again once I had finished all my final projects and my winter holiday had started.
So when my winter holiday started I was flying back to Finland to visit my loved ones and I opened a steemit posting tab on my phone so that I would be ready to write whenever I felt like it. But the feeling never came. A few times I started writing only to be unsatisfied with the process and erase everything. Each more day that I had the tab open it looked less and less appealing and I started to feel guilty when thinking about all the people that I used to follow who I had not been supporting for weeks or maybe even months. I felt so unmotivated to post even though I had all these beautiful photos and exciting stories to write about. And this mix of a loss of motivation and a feeling of guilt made even reading posts and commenting on them feel like a burden.
Another thing that I struggle with is the thought of not being able to delete any of the posts I make if I one day decide that I am not happy with them. I have chosen to use my own name and my own pictures while blogging, and the thought that anything that I write here will stay on the internet forever is kind of scary to me. What kind of a picture do I want to give of myself to anyone who will ever be interested in reading my story? How much of myself am I ready to share, and will my opinion about this change as I grow older?
I also put quite high standards for myself, especially when it comes to any kind of creative work, so writing a post usually takes me hours or days to complete and even then I seldom feel completely happy with the end result. Having that high expectations on myself kind of kills the fun of sharing whatever it is that I am feeling passionate about in the moment.
I have to be honest, even though I love steemit and many of the things that it stands for, for a while I did not want to have anything to do with the site because it reminded me of how I had failed to keep up with the goals and dreams I had set for myself when I first found it.
But here I am. I am back on steemit, and even though I have not quite gotten back my excitement for writing I am still happy to be here. And this time I have decided to allow myself to not post for weeks or even months if that is what happens, because I want steemit to be a fun, inspiring, teaching experience and feeling guilty about not posting or commenting is not going to help. I am also going to allow myself to let fun be more important than perfect, and realize that it is okay to sometimes write short posts or only post pictures.
(The pictures in this post are a sneak peak of what I got to experience during my thanksgiving road trip. More pictures will come later.)
Is there anyone else out there in this steemit community who is or has been feeling the same way? What helped in getting you back to feeling like writing, reading and commenting was fun again? Maybe we can find a way support each other to feel more at home here!
Thank you for reading and please do leave a comment if you relate!
mialinnea
