On Blogs and Letting Go

I think I may be developing an addiction for blogs. Not for blogging, mind you, just for creating blogs. This is the fourth one I have started in the last three months and I have ideas for more.

The thing is that it is really doing a number on my creative self-esteem. I spent three days trying to think up a name for this blog and, once I had a few in mind, I found out that most of them had already been taken. I must have gone through about twenty until I came up with "Wide-eyed Redhead" and, to tell you the truth, I'm not too thrilled with it. But what really got to me in the whole process is that whenever I found out that one of my ideas for names was taken I would, of course, go look at the blog to see who should have dared use my name idea before I had it and, nine times out of ten, it was a blog started at least five years ago with one post on it. And always some really pathetic first post too. One that says something like, "So...I decided to start a blog. My name's Heather. I like horses and water-skiing." So then I started to feel bad, like "I've got the same ideas as these people?".

I mean, poor Heather. She never got up the gumption to get back into it and apparently doesn't realize that several years later someone might be stumbling onto her blog and making fun of her for it. I actually came across one ("Ranting Redhead" maybe) where the author wrote about how she was going through a break-up. It was awful. I have to hope that the reason she never got back to blogging was because the next day she met someone amazing and fell swiftly in love. Otherwise, it's just plain depressing to think about.

Anyway, back to me. My other blogs were created for 1) spiritual pondering, 2) political diatribing, and 3) sharing photos of my beautiful baby girl, Beatrix. The last one is the only one that's really being used. The purpose of this blog is, most simply put, to "let go". None of the above blogs offered a space for me to just write about my thoughts on my own life (like a well-edited diary). And I think it might do me some good to do so.

I recently challenged myself to stop being afraid of the past. Because I really am a huge scaredy-cat when it comes to the past. I am haunted by all sorts of old memories. They appear out of nowhere and petrify me or just make me feel worthless. I want to get them out in the open as a way of freeing myself of them. This worked with the novel that was stuck (think constipated) in my head for years. In 2007, I participated in NaNoWriMo and very roughly and horridly plunked out a semi-autobiographical 50,000-word novel on life in Portland, Oregon at the turn of this century among twenty-somethings. I didn't really finish the novel, but I got enough of it out that I no longer needed to keep it rolling around in my brain. Now whenever I have a fleeting thought about writing that story I just think, "Oh, good. It's already written down. I don't need to think about remembering it anymore."

Here's hoping it'll work this time too.