Some things are harder to write about than others.
I try my best to do a lot of truth-telling on this blog. That often means admitting when things aren’t perfect. It means sharing the hard days of motherhood, the dark, embarrassing parts of motherhood.
It also means sharing the hard, scary personal truths. Like when you hoped for things and they didn’t turn out the way you wanted and you were sad even though you could see that, in the end, they would actually turn out better.
It would be really easy to talk myself out of sharing these things. You see, in the moment, it feels good to write it all out and get it off my chest.
But then I sleep on it, and the next morning I wake up and things look different. The stress and exhaustion have lessened and suddenly “honesty” looks more like weakness or oversharing.
I felt those feelings in that moment, but my blog post immortalized those feelings forever.
Is that really what I wanted to do? Maybe I should have let the moment pass.
But then, is writing about only the good moments deceiving? Like pretending the bad moments don’t exist too?
I’ve struggled with this dilemma for a long time. Before I even had a blog, I wrote in journals. Time would pass and I would go back and read the journal and what I had written would no longer be true. And I would think, “What if someone finds this and thinks this represents me and how I feel, but it doesn’t anymore?” So I would rip out the journal pages and throw them away.
I’ve deleted more than one blog for the same reason. The temptation is still there to edit what you all see.
But the truth is, trying to make this space a perfect representation of who I am is impossible. Because I’m constantly changing. And because writing the full range of the human feelings and thoughts and dreams in one tiny little blog is impossible, if that were the goal I would either delete everything I write or worse, never write at all.
Yesterday I wrote a post about not having it all at once. The post isn’t perfect and it doesn’t come close to capturing my feelings on the topic. But I could choose to spend hours agonizing over how to make the post perfect. Or I could write what I’m feeling to the best of my ability and then go play with my kids.
Or I could go back and feel frustrated that I didn’t get it exactly right and delete it.
Instead, I’m trying to make peace with the fact that this blog will never be perfect and sometimes how I feel will change right after I’ve written it down and so what once was true for me isn’t anymore and that’s okay.
At the end of the day I’d rather have a collection of imperfect moments to look back on than have nothing at all simply because I was too scared to not get it exactly right.