No point crying over spilled milk – time to give up being proper
I’m frozen again, stuck in indecision and self doubt. It’s the tyranny of the proper! I started this blog for me – as a developmental space where I could perform and play with my creative wings. I had been lonely without a community of creatives and people to share outputs with. The blog seemed like a space to share, play with and perform into. But a few people have seen the blog and now it feels PROPER! I feel under pressure to do better, to do a good job, to be professional, well to be honest, I feel like suddenly I have to be perfect. Those feelings make me stop writing and drawing and making images. I start to feel overwhelmed and try to forget the act of creating because it suddenly feels loaded and measured.
It’s not going to work this time though! I’m not going to be terrorised by these feelings. I’m not going to buy into this false dichotomy between play and proper. I’m going to keep playing and try my best never to fall into proper. I’ve managed to get the energy and wherewithal to escape the tyranny of proper just in the nick of time. It’s thanks to remembering a conversation I had with colleagues who I was learning with in an online course on Social Therapy run by the East Side Institute. We were talking about warm up games that get people loosened up for work. We spoke about the danger zone where people feel they need to transition from warm up play to work – that so many things can go wrong at this point. I remembered that conversation today and realised that I started playing and enjoying the blog but then ended up thinking about it as proper, and got stuck.
I don’t have the exact answer but I have a strong feeling that the answer lies in the thoughts and actions that started in that conversation. I have an intuition that I need to stop thinking about being a proper blogger, stop reading ‘how to blog’ stuff and just keep playing, creating, for the sake of doing it, for the joy of doing it, and not so that it can be proper. I need to resist the tyranny of the proper!
The burden of wings 
Absolutely Trudy! Your blog is what *you* want it to be 🙂 That way, it stays fun and you’ll attract like-minded souls. If you think about it any other way, it’s just a burden. It becomes a monster to be fed! We went through the same process with our blog. Write for enjoyment, when you’ve got something to say. Anything else is overthinking it 🙂
Thanks so much James, that’s a relief to know I’m on the right track. Feels like I’m very much making it up as I go along in a world that is just slightly out of my reach in terms of fully understanding the technology 🙂 I definitely don’t want to end up with a monster to feed!