Facing My Fear

For most of my 20+ years on this Earth, I've hated to write.  Even as far back as first grade I can remember dreading assignments involving writing example sentences for our spelling words.  As time passed, my hatred only grew stronger.  The most simple assignments in fifth grade would bring me to tears and leave me breaking pencils in half!  By the time I reached high school, I realized that I am actually a pretty decent writer, but I still didn't enjoy it.

My senior English teacher changed that.  Every day, we started class with a 5-10 minute journal entry.  Usually she gave us a silly question or prompt and on Fridays we had "Friday Free Write".  Our journals were never graded for content, only for the number of entries we wrote.  She even would count the occasional entry that was just an entire page of "blah blah blah".  I found it very relaxing, and sometimes even freeing to not worry about grammar and punctuation and about whether or not I was getting my point across.  It was so nice to just write.

From that point on, writing wasn't quite so terrible.  Don't get me wrong, I still quiver in fear at the mention of a research paper, and I will put off assignments until the last possible minute, but once I get started, it's really not so bad.  Last semester I was invited to be a blogger for Notes From the Digital Frontier on mediapost.  I signed up for the spot thinking that it would be a good way for me to continue to improve my writing and to help me get past my procrastination issues.  To be honest, I don't think it helped in either area.

Even though I am majoring in a technology-related field, I still had a hard time finding topics that were interesting to me, and there were sometimes two or three weeks in a row that I didn't write at all, meaning I wrote several posts at the last minute to meet my quota for the semester.

All of these slightly bizarre experiences have led up to this strange, scary idea of mine to write a blog.  I am very intimidated, and even a little afraid, of this new venture of mine... But isn't that what life is about?  Trying new things, facing our fears?  With all the crazy new things I have in my pretty near future, I figure I better get started on at least one of them.