This is my second Honest to Blog post, a post free of edits or careful rephrasing. This also mean it probably contains some typos and potentially annoying grammatical errors.

My goodness it is hard to blog these days.

I love to write. I love sharing my life with other people, starting conversations through blog topics, changing and exploring how I feel about things through posting about it. But sometimes, especially recently…I’m finding I have almost nothing to say.

I have plenty of things going on in my head. I have so many things I want to do. But I’m not doing anything interesting. I’m not actively working toward a goal, just an overarching ‘life happiness’ one. Trying to figure out what I actually want to do, what I think is most important to get out of the life I’ve been given. This is such an exciting and terrifying beginning part of my life…I feel like I’m just inching closer and closer to the start of a big rollercoaster drop. I only get to be here a few times—only get to look out at all that’s stretched in front of me and then choose which way I’m going to go, with dramatic differences between the choices.

With all of that, I find it a little silly that I’m saying “I can’t think of anything to write about.” I have so much to say. I am thinking so, so, so much about every possible direction I could take and everything that I could do with my life.

The problem is that I’ve run out of immediate things. I can only post daily updates when there are things to update. Right now I’m in a still period—I’m standing still while I figure out what it is that I want to do next—and so my days mostly consist of waking up, walking to the bus stop, getting to work, working, walking back to the bus stop, riding to my other job, working, coming home and falling asleep. I love the busy-ness. I love the rush, and the way I can lay down in bed at night and fall right asleep and that I don’t have hours and hours of unobstructed time in front of me that I feel like I should have something to show for when they’re over. I was working, all that time, so it counts. I finished something.

But it doesn’t make for very good blogging material. You don’t want to read about the same thing every day, and I don’t want to write about it. I definitely don’t want to write about it.

So why can’t I share what I’m thinking? What I want to do?

I have so much I want to do. So much. I could write and write and write and not finish it all for days. But I’m hesitant when it comes to starting—and I think I’ve figured out why. I think it comes down to that sharing them makes them real. Sharing them means telling someone else what I want out of life—so that more than just me knows if I end up disappointed. Sharing means saying “I want this” and people knowing if I got in the way of my own goals, or thinking that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and will be so disappointed when I find out what the real world is like. I can’t just decide that it’s a little silly or too much work or too far-fetched later and let that particular dream fall through the cracks. It means taking responsibility for getting the experiences I want out of my life.

Sharing makes the things that I’ve so far just been lucky enough to dream about more substantial. It means that I might have to see some of them in a more real sense, and deal with the logistical things that come along with realizing them. It means I might have to let some of them go because they weren’t what I thought they were, or that they simply won’t work. My life and my dreams can’t just be dreams, untouched and still perfect in my head anymore. It makes them vulnerable to damage and disappointment. Nothing is ever how you imagined it, and it’s so hard to let go of the dream-version of your life and actually get to the living part.

And that’s so, so, so scary.

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This is my second Honest to Blog post, a post free of edits or careful rephrasing. This also mean it probably contains some very un-careful typos and potentially annoying grammatical errors.

Yesterday, someone that I knew in real life texted me with something to say. When they first had started reading my blog, they really liked what I was doing with it, but upon a more recent visit, were pretty upset about it.

He (let’s just call him “John”) was super annoyed with the amount of personal posts, and their lack of meaning or substance. Annoyed with the fact that I was posting ‘the mundane activities of my every day’ just for people to read and as a result, think better of me and my life. He thought it was totally selfish and pointless to do, and that rather than using the positive influence my blog could have for the benefit of other people, I was using it to build myself up and just talk about myself.

At first I was really defensive. A couple of things popped in to my head, the biggest being this is my blog and I can write about whatever I want. Another was you can’t expect me to have something important and life-changing to say with every post. Another was if you don’t like it, don’t read it.

But, I think that every sort of criticism can have its merit, if you think about it in a certain light. There are probably people out there who, while they don’t say it, think the same thing. I don’t usually enjoy blogs that only talk about events that happen in the blogger’s life with a few pictures for splash, either. If all I’m going to talk about is how happy I am with my life at the moment, I probably shouldn’t blog. If all I have to say is what I got at the grocery store this weekend, I probably shouldn’t blog either.

But I also think that there is a place for some of that. This is, at its core, a personal blog. If people were looking for information on well-being and fitness topics, there are a myriad of sites that can provide that advice from experts in those fields, without any of the personal fluff. If you want to find out how to get more protein in your diet, how to start running, or how to make a green tea smoothie, you can pretty much do a Google search and find out in less than ten minutes.

There’s a reason that people read my blog instead of (or at least, in addition to) those websites. It’s the personal journal of someone going through similar things as you are. Someone who gets excited about things just like you, someone who struggles or is disappointed with other things, just like you. Humans are empathetic creatures that are always a little bit awed by what is going on in another person’s life. Interested in how things work out for them, even if the outcome has absolutely nothing to do with themselves. Take movies for example. Why are we interested in people we don’t know pretending to be other people we don’t know and acting out a story that didn’t happen—as we hope that everything will work out well in the end?

And I think it’s largely to do with the fact that we like seeing people go through struggles and pull through. We like seeing people succeed, and like seeing how they deal with problems. If other people can go through rough times but still having shining, happy periods, then we can too.

This blog is also a point of reflection for me. I try to stay as positive as I can in my life, see the good things happening to me and remember them, so that they’ll keep me afloat when things aren’t so good.

You’ve read my journey, my admission that I’m still not 100% happy and healthy all the time, my negative feelings about the ED community. I needed to talk about those things, they were heavy on my heart and serious. But I also need to talk about the exciting things that happen to me in  my life. It’s theraputic for me. It’s a reminder for later, that if I go through another difficult time, I can still come out of it. I can still feel happiness again. I can look back on those memories and actually read how I was feeling at that time, and maybe feel a little bit of that again. Not every post is going to be dramatic and life-changing. Not every post is going to be light and silly and happy, either.

The bottom-line goal for this blog is to be an accurate reflection of my life, an environment of support and positivity, and a point of hope for people who aren’t there yet. 

I’m not there yet, either. Everything I do is always a work of progress, and I would honestly appreciate any feedback that might help me reach that goal. But I also need to remember that this is my blog and that I need to post what I feel like I want to at the time, regardless of its point or purpose. When I’m happy, I’m going to say so.

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• honesttoblog

I’ve noticed a theme recently in the blog world. Maybe it’s a trend that just started, maybe it’s something that I’m just starting to notice because I feel the same way.

It’s honesty. I posted about authenticity in the blog world a while back. For a long time, I felt like I couldn’t be honest on my own blog, because I had built up an impossible standard for myself in the eyes of my readers, and felt like I would lose that if I was truthful about how I was really doing.

For some reason, the bloggers that get really big, that always get the most enthusiastic comments, that have a whole swarm of readers, are the ones that seem perfect. They’re the ones that seem to have an absolutely perfect life, skipping from one fun activity to the next, with nothing that ever seems to drag them down.

But recently, I’ve noticed that I’m not really reading those blogs anymore. Sure, I’ll scan through their fun day out pictures, but that’s really it. I spend more time reading and responding to blogs that are truthful about their struggles, truthful that they might not have everything together. I feel much closer to bloggers that don’t seem to have this perfect, unshakable facade.

And I feel like I’ve been seeing more and more of that recently. Maybe it’s the new year, maybe it’s just a trend in blogging—bloggers are getting more honest. They’re sharing when they’re struggling, or when things aren’t as perfect as they’d like them to be. They’re sharing when they have doubts. They’re also sharing that there are parts of their lives they don’t share. That they aren’t going to lug their camera to a restaurant and spend half the night taking pictures at their sister’s birthday party if they don’t want to, just so they have something to blog about. They’re sharing that sometimes they don’t have anything to say, and that authenticity does not necessarily mean consistency. 

I fell in love with Little Chief Honeybee’s Honest To Blog feature. Every week, she posts something she’s been thinking about, something she’s struggling with, or some opinion that she holds—and then hits publish without editing. Without going back and correcting any of her grammar mistakes, or softening an opinion to not offend someone. 

Without diluting the honesty of the post.

And I absolutely adore that idea. She said she wouldn’t mind if readers started their own Honest to Blog features…so here I am, starting my own. It may not be every week, because honestly, I don’t know if I’ll have something honest to say every week. But there will be more than a few of them.

Here is my first Honest to Blog post.

And, just for your reading pleasure, here are some of my very favorite honest-to-goodness posts that I’ve read:

1. Reckless Truth Telling
From Momastery

2. No More Apologies
From Casey Leigh 

3. Without Self-Love I Have Nothing
From Oh She Glows

4. Reality
From Young People In Love

5. Ulterior Motives
From Little Chief Honey Bee 

6. My Decision
From Busy Bee Lauren 

7. Not Quite Sure How To Put This
From Finding Thin Again 

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• honesttoblog

This my first Honest to Blog post, a post free of edits or careful rephrasing. This also mean it probably contains some very un-careful typos and potentially annoying grammatical errors.

I don’t know what it is with me and 5ks. I’ve never run one, officially at least, even though I’ve been pretty intensely interested in running and fitness for over a year. Until a few months ago, I had never run a ‘real’ three miles. I had run on treadmills and cross-training machines, but somehow I knew that those wouldn’t match the kind of exercise I would get outside in the open air.

I think I just thought I couldn’t. Every time I went out to run, I’d be huffing and puffing after a mile, so hard that I’d have to stop—even though I could run 8, 9, 10 miles in a gym on a machine. I wasn’t really running there, I thought. I couldn’t really run.

But sometime in June of last year, I was feeling like I wasn’t moving, I wasn’t growing, I wasn’t getting anything done. I felt a little bit discouraged. I don’t even remember what was going on at the time, but I was anxious, and sort of fed up, and knew I needed toget outside and burn some of that away. I’ve always had my best workouts when I was feeding off an emotional high—being angry or upset for some reason I’ve forgotten by now.

But this time I didn’t have a gym membership, didn’t have access to some cardio machine that I could pour my heart into. I could only run.

I decided I would run three miles, right then. When I finished, I would know that I could do something. That I could set a goal and complete it right then, a big one, one that’d been looming over me for a long time.

I didn’t run very fast. I figured the reason I hadn’t succeeded before was because I was running too fast, too worried about what people driving by or passing me on the indoor track would think to go at a comfortable pace. But this time I didn’t care, I was just running for me.

I realized I always assume the best of people I see out running. If they’re walking, they’re probably warming up or cooling down. If they’re running slow, they’re probably on their eleventh mile. If they look ready to pass out, they’re working themselves really hard, and that takes determination. I don’t know why I didn’t apply this theory to myself. Being exhausted and covered in sweat, no matter how short a time it took you to get there, is never something to be insecure about. You’ve pushed yourself hard, so hard you can barely take a full breath.

So I ran really slowly. And I listened to some of my favorite, favorite songs, regardless of whether or not they could “push me to the next level.” I was running to run, I had no idea how many calories I was burning, I wasn’t trying to look like I was working harder than whoever was next to me on the treadmill. I didn’t know if my heart rate was in my target cardio zone or what the incline of this particular stretch of hill was. I didn’t care. I was just going to run three miles, outside, and that was the only thing I needed to know.

During the last half mile stretch, my legs felt like lead and I could barely take a breath. I had a pain in my side that felt like a knife. I wanted to stop, so, so, so badly, but I kept running. I slowed down a lot toward the end, what I was doing could have barely been classified as a run, but it was still running. It wasn’t walking, and it wasn’t whatever bouncy verb that I did on an elliptical machine was.

I finished, though. I ran three whole miles, through puddles and across streets and through traffic on hard cement that worked my bones just as hard as it worked my muscles. I didn’t have a drinking fountain around the corner or a fan option to turn on when I got hot. When I finished I laid down right in the grass, between the sidewalk and the road, and didn’t care if three miles was some marathon runner’s warm up or if I had run at an absolutely atrocious pace.

After that, after I knew I could ‘really run’, I decided I didn’t want to run in a gym again, at least not for a while. I’ve always hated being cold, but I bought long thermal running pants and fleece headband for running when the temperature dropped. I wanted to be outside, really running, and be able to see all the things I passed and say “I ran this much.” I liked the changing scenery, how good a puddle felt on a really warm day, how I had to run around a patch of ice on the sidewalk or risk slipping to my death. I liked that someone couldn’t watch my whole workout, from start to finish, and judge whether or not I was working harder than they were, or if I was more or less fit.

And that’s why I’ve decided I’m never going to post my running times. I might tell you I PR’d by 34 seconds, or that I reached a certain goal of mine. But running faster than someone else doesn’t mean anything to me anymore—that’s what had been preventing me from ‘real’ running in the first place. I don’t want someone else to think that they’re not working hard enough, or that they’re inferior for some reason because they aren’t running as fast as I am. That’s actually highly unlikely, to be honest, because from what I’ve gathered by looking at other people’s running times, I’m really slow. I’d probably come in at the very most the middle of any 5k race I ran, if not toward the end. I’ve never been sure that I wanted to run one anyway, because I don’t want to feel discouraged. I don’t want anyone else’s successes to make me feel like what I’m doing, even though I finish every run in a pool of sweat with my heart beating all the way to my ears, isn’t good enough.

What I do know, though, is that I run at least a second faster almost every single time I go out. I’m beating the best opponent I could possibly find: yesterday’s me. As long as I’m improving, I don’t care what anyone else is doing. I’m faster than I was last week, much faster than I was when I started, and I can get as fast as I want to.

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• honesttoblog