Non-stress Blogging

Today was my day to post at the Young Adult Catholics blog again.

It’s been almost exactly a year since I began blogging there. I applied as a writer because I’d recently made the commitment to myself for the millionth time that I would seek more opportunities to share my writing with a real audience. I didn’t know how I would continue to find something to write about every two weeks, but I hoped my obsession with Catholicism would be enough to keep my mind and eyes open for material.

In the beginning, I kept a list of all my ideas. I wrote my posts the night before so I could post them first thing Tuesday morning. As time went on, I lost my list (which also, incidentally, included my ideas for this blog). I stopped writing posts the night before. Then I stopped writing them first thing on Tuesday mornings, and “sometime on Tuesday” became good enough. That’s where I am now, and sometimes I don’t really know what I’m going to write about until about three minutes before I open WordPress. And you know what? That’s OK.

I realized that knowing what I wanted to write two weeks in advance or keeping a fantastic list or thinking about my blog while I brushed my teeth or did the dishes didn’t make me a writer. Only one thing could do that, and that’s the thing that happens when I finally sit down at the computer and confront that oh-so-empty blogging interface (or Word Processor page, or journal page). And at the end, I breathe a sigh of relief that I was able to fill it one more time. I’ll worry about whether I can do so again tomorrow . . . tomorrow.