Today I'd simply like to share the preceding quotation with you. I discovered it in Brene Brown's terrific book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. If you haven't read it, now's the time. Truly.
In the spirit of vulnerability, I will say that this I'm keeping this post quotation-centered because that's all I can muster at the moment.
Over the past week I drafted two full-length posts but when I read them this morning, they simply didn't ring true.
They sounded like someone trying to sound like she knows what she's talking about.
The reality is, life is a process of trial and error. It's a deep, all-encompassing, often-frightening foray into questions that only you can answer for yourself.
Which begs the question, what can I say on Working Self that you can't discover for yourself? What can I write that hasn't already been said by countless life coaches and self-proclaimed personal growth gurus? What can I offer that truly enables us all to transcend the platitudes and wrestle with the messy stuff, side by side, one seeker next to another?
I believe in my core that community and reading and research can help us grapple with possible answers.
I know in my gut that the blogosphere was created for just this purpose - not for making money off of ads and affliliates or spouting more cliches or self-promoting ad nauseum.
And I know beyond all other knowledges that I'm here to help others discover the work they're meant to do, and to walk beside them as they finally get down to doing it, lest that work never be done.
Yet translating that into a website? <sigh> Hard stuff.
I'll be giving this place a facelift soon, and I want a contentlift to accompany it.
I just don't know how.
(Sheesh, no wonder I can't write any more!)
So here's my vulnerable moment: I'm scared I may never be able to fully do the work I'm meant to do. I'm afraid I'll squander this prime opportunity to trigger the unfurling of others' great, important work. I'm terrified that I'll write for decades only to look back and discover that I did nothing to further the conversation, adding only more hollow words to the already overloaded information explosion.
Maybe that's precisely will happen.
Life has no guarantees.
But I'm determined to keep writing all the same. One word at a time.
And with each word, I'll thank you for continuing reading. We can grow more vulnerable together.
In what ways have you become more vulnerable as you've gotten older?
(PS - Since I know how amazingly supportive this community of readers is, I want to head you off by saying that I'm sincerely not fishing for compliments. I realize that the standard I hold myself to may be higher than what others may expect from me. In some domains this may be problematic, but on this blog I think it's reasonable: you're worth as much. And more.)