How I’ve Changed Since Starting This Blog

It’s been a busy few days of selling jewelry, dancing, and writing my prelims, but I’m at 63 pages (including the maximum 25 pages for the one I’ve been spending most of my time working on) so it’s time to watch a little bit of the Olympics and do some blogging.

Once in a while, it’s a good idea to look back, mostly to see if someone’s chasing behind you, but sometimes just to see how far you’ve come. No special occasion, it’s not any sort of anniversary, but it was just something I was thinking about in the car today. So here are a few ways I’ve changed for the better since starting writing here.

1. Self-awareness. I definitely think that I have become more self-aware. I feel like since I have a place on the Internet where I can speak uninterrupted and unfettered, I don’t feel the need to overshare in real life. I personally don’t think I’m an oversharing type of person, but now, I don’t know, there are some times in my life where I feel weird sharing it out loud and prefer to say it in my head or to myself. Of course, there are things that I don’t share here, but those things are usually the kinds of things I don’t share anyway. And again, I’m the only one that matters when it comes to how I…come across, but I think that by and large, I’ve had more positive than negative social interactions in recent times.

2. Better behaved, in general. What I mean by this: at times I want to blog about my daily life, obviously I’m not going to blog about a time when I’ve embarrassed myself, but it’s kind of like reality television: if those moments don’t happen, then there’s no footage of it. I don’t talk about my blog on very many occasions in real life, and if I do, I just kind of say “I wrote about it in my blog…” and that’s the end of it, and obviously, there’s curation that goes on in any online presence, but painting myself as a person I’m not – ooh what just happened to Aly Raisman just now on the balance beam, I was looking down and I missed it – is a whole lot harder when there are fewer dramatic corrections to be made.

3. What’s worthwhile. The things that I want to look back on, and posts on mine that I reread, are the funny, well-thought-out ones, and not just the rambles of daily life, or oblique references to some situation the specifics of which I’ve long forgotten. Reading a depressing poem is not something I’d want future me to read,  or anyone else for that matter, or commentary on some event (whether global or just in my own life) that ends up being insignificant.

I had some other thoughts today, but of course I didn’t write them down anywhere, but if I remember them, I’ll add them. Oh, and yay to my 37,000th Revolver Maps visitor, from Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. And now, back to watching Team USA Olympic Gymnastic domination.

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