Blogophobia

I have been away from you dear blog for a long time and it makes me feel terrible. I am beginning to feel an onset of a new condition that I will call blogophobia.

There are many aspects to this fear of blogging in my case. Firstly, as of today I find that I have already skipped many key events of the past year without comment. There are also many half-formed thoughts lurking about as drafts, suspended in their own temporal dimension, as the weight of passing days buries them further away from the here and now. Whenever I start to blog they seem to reproach me at my tardiness, so I just turn my head away from the blog sighing that perhaps it is too much work and effort to dig this far into the past. When I re-read the half-formed thoughts in some of these drafts, I fail even to remember what I was on about, and in this case it is easiest to hit discard draft, but  I still have seven half-finished ones waiting to see the light.

The other aspect of my fear is that I am, as I often find myself in life, straddling some fine dividing line. I do not think I have anything profound to say, yet I find myself too proud, and too old to post just every day drivel. And caught between what I can write and what I aspire to write I just stay silent. My blogophobia gets worse when I read a terrible piece – How awful, I never want to sound like THIS. It deepens again when I read something brilliant – There is no way I can ever write like THAT; it is a vicious, and never-ending circle.

Like anywhere else in life though, it is useless to stay afraid. A day comes when you have to face your fear. So what if I do not have anything important to say? So what if I never come up with a profound thought or never blog a life-changing adventure or experience? There is blessing in being ordinary, and there are pleasures in blogging about toilet-training mishaps or toddler language and logic.

Even in the middle of all this ordinariness there bound to be a light-bulb moment, and a brilliant thought, but if I do not put my fingers to the keyboard to capture mundane moments and thoughts, I will never have the courage to articulate occasional brilliance.

I am hoping this will be the year to get this blog going again. Maybe I will take this blogging challenge for 2011.