little black journal

I’ve been watching the count on my blog entries tick up and up, and today marks a bit of a milestone:  welcome to post #400!  When I started this blog four years ago, it was largely because I wanted an incentive to seek interesting experiences and to document those experiences in interesting ways.  I’m sure that many people blog because they travel, or they make things, or they think deep thoughts, and they want to share that with the world.  Sounds strange, but I was hoping that the inverse would hold true for me – I was in a rut, and I was thinking that I would go more places, be more creative, do more cool stuff because I blog.  Nobody follows a blog full of entries that read, “today was just like yesterday, and tomorrow will be just like today”, right?  To some degree, my backwards logic has worked – I look for ways to make my weekends interesting (and often fail, but whatever), I feel motivated to take on a creative project when I realize how long it’s been since I’ve posted anything in the ‘made’ category, and I take lots more photos now that I have an avenue by which to share them.  And that’s all good stuff; now Shane and I have this nice little record of our trips and our Seattle experiences and our time with friends and family.

But lately, I’m feeling a tug to dig a little deeper.  There’s not a lot of soul-baring going on around here, which is partly due to the fact that I’m still navigating just how personal I want to be in a journal entry that starts with “www.”, but also due to the fact that I rarely make an effort to check in with myself, to put the brakes on, turn down the noise, and think about how I’m really doing.  My posts center around what I did, read, saw, or made, because when I’m not in go-mode, I prefer to just shut off my mind completely, finding my restoration in an hour of napping or TV vegging.  I’m so inspired by the talent some of my closest friends have for bravely, articulately sharing their hearts on their online journals – I want to write with that kind of emotion and honesty and introspection.  So consider this an early New Years resolution: I want to get real.  Sure, you’ll still find plenty of frilly photos and mundane weekend updates popping up around here, but ultimately I’ll be striving to make this place a better reflection of who I am, and not just what I do.  Sheesh – just writing that I want to write more honestly makes me nervous!  This will be be a process, folks – bear (and bare?) with me.