The First Step

Welcome.  Welcome to my humble, badly-written blog.

My name is Steph.  I am a mistress of resistance, a pro at procrastination.  I am so good at procrastination that this blog is an act of procrastination to avoid doing something that might be scarier, more lucrative and more productive.  I typically get these great big ideas, and then I figure out how not to execute them.  It’s my forte.

That is how this blog started.  The latest in my string of big, beautiful ideas (the list really is quite impressive) was to start a blog that would describe my journey to overcome my depression, in the hopes that it might help people who are where I was ten years ago.  I wanted to give them all my experience, my tips, and my recommendations.  In typical resistant fashion, the very first thing I did was to dig out the Blogging for Dummies book my sister gave me. (Because you know how vitally important research is to procrastinators.  .  . but only if it's long, exhaustive, exhausting, and never-ending.)  I couldn’t skip straight to the chapter that actually tells you how to start a blog—oh no no no!—I had to read the introduction, memorize all the blogging terms and get acquainted with the blogosphere by browsing 20 or 30 examples on the Internet.  Then, finally, I got to the part about setting up my first blog.

When the initial setup was done, I sat there in front of the computer and had a big, fat realization: this was not going to be fun.  Because it wasn’t going to be perfect, and I was going to agonize over that.  In fact, it might be quite bad and excruciating to both write and read.  And that would kill my desire to blog.  My perfectionism has been the weapon of my resistance that has relentlessly murdered most of my creative desires.

I decided in that moment that I’d had it.  I’d had it with letting all my mental crap get in the way of pursuing my dreams.  So The Badly-Written Blog was born.  I am done with trying and pretending to be perfect.  I am outing myself here and now.

I am going to write a blog.  And it’s going to be imperfect.  It might be downright awful.  But I’m writing it anyway.