Last week, I mentioned that I hear from many people who tell me they are thinking about starting a blog. After I wrote about that, I heard from even more which was delightful. One friend spilled the beans that she had actually already started blogging, but that she had a stumbling block of not really feeling like she had direction for what she wanted to write or who her audience is. I identified with that a LOT.

I’m sharing this little adage for two reasons.

1. My friend is a professional writer. A very experienced professional writer. If you are neither of those things, then you can let yourself off the hook a little if you are, like her, struggling with where to begin.
2. After our little exchange, I thought about what she’d said a lot – about how true that all felt for me as well and about what advice, if I was the advice giving type, I would have given her.

JUST WRITE

That was the advice that I borrowed from Elizabeth Dehn, creator of my new favourite website, Beauty Bets. I still believe that it is sound and a great place to start, but I’ve added my own two word mantra to the mix with the following.

be yourself

I’ve always been an advocate for transparency and truth when it comes to personal representation online. It’s how I coach my friends, family and clients to be. Through social media or my blog(s), I’ve always wanted to maintain the reality of my personality. Partly because I want to be genuine and act with integrity, but also because I feel like keeping up a fake persona would just be so much work and, if I’m honest, I probably don’t have a lengthy enough attention span to make it happen. When people caution others to be careful about what they put on social media for how it might impact their careers or other goals, I often think that maybe the more helpful advice would just be to be a better person. Know what I mean?

But once I dug a little deeper into this advice and really searched my heart and soul, I started to realize that there is one way in which I hold back, one way in which I’m not really honest or myself. I did some digging into the things I enjoy, what makes me happy and how I get the most out of life. What I’m about to say is something that it took me a long time to realize (and even longer to accept), something for which I have a passive-aggressive acquaintance to thank and something that I’ve slowly had to become more comfortable with.

i am a cheerleader

I don’t cheer for everyone and I certainly don’t cheer for everything, but I am at least a little bit in love with so many of the people and things I see in the world and so many of the things that I do. I like drawing attention to great things that are being done. I like putting a spotlight on the people who are doing them. Based on my perception, there really isn’t anything wrong with that, but I couldn’t avoid asking myself the question: why do I hide it? I didn’t come up with a very thorough or complex answer, but here are a few of my suspicions. (My awaken response in brackets.)

• People get really ornery when it comes to positivity and enthusiasm. I have to defend myself against naysayers on the regular. (That isn’t something I enjoy.)
• It can come across as fake, gimmicky, simple or trite. (I am none of those things.)
• Sometimes people have different opinions/experiences. (Big deal. You do you.)
• What if I’m wrong? (Are you even being serious with this?)

Finally, there’s the old, haunting standby: “loving things isn’t a theme” to which I have decided to take the position, “says who?” Because loving things is my theme – it’s how I go through my days and nights, it’s what makes me smile and laugh, it’s how I choose who to spend my time with and what we will do. This is who I am and that is exactly how I want to be.

And, you know what I concluded, the more I thought about it? If they don’t like it, well fuck ’em.

And then Rory Lula McMahan posted this on her Instagram this morning: The High Priestess. Here was her summary of today’s occurrence of this card.

LITTLE: Put some heart in your head. BIG: There is too much going on right now. Your mind is spinning with tasks, ideas, goals, dreams, wants, needs – and a great big dose of overwhelm. There is just so much you think you should be getting done, but all you keep hearing yourself say is how you can’t get anything figured out, or even which direction to start in. Don’t write off that spinning head of yours. It is actually trying to get a great deal of valuable information out for you to use, in its own ridiculously tangled way. The key for moving from anxiety to efficiency – or more importantly, peace – is to filter it all through your soul. The world, and your mind, is telling you to do only the things they desire from you. But right now, you need to figure out what it is that you desire. Not the pipe dreams and what-ifs and quietly envious imitations, but what you truly, really, actually want to do with your very sacred time. Stop worrying about if anyone else is going to like it and think about whether you do. That fear and frustration, that knot in your belly, is definitely not any fun, but it is up to you to look deeper and understand which parts are telling you to let go and which parts are telling you to dig in, which parts are obligation and which are love, which are the voices of others and which is the voice of your own true self. Yes, it feels like a war is being waged within your own inner spaces. And as with any war, there will be some loss. But listen, and you will finally hear what your intuition has been whispering through the chaos: You are actually on the verge of gaining it all.

I think that confirms it. That confirms everything.  ♥

What does this mean for this space? All good things. Stick around and you can expect more loving, more sharing, more cheerleading. And now that I’m free to be me, I’m hoping there’ll be a little more consistency.

What’s holding you back? How could you be more true to yourself online and off?