Building Self-Support: Facing My Relationship with Writing in My Blog -- Day 30

A point that I have been wanting to open up for a little while now is that of self-support within my relationship to writing this blog.

30 days ago I made half-decision to start writing in here every day. I say "half-decision" because it isn't anything I declared to anyone, even myself. It didn't take long, however, for the accumulation of days to feel like notches on a belt, and I wanted more notches. I wanted to "be serious" about this, but more than that I wanted to "look serious," and I wrote a lot about how my ego was coming into play in my writing to where I felt like I was being quite fraudulent and I was writing for purposes of grandiosity. I wrote my way through that, but I continued to experience various energetic charges in relation to my writing. Part of why I am choosing to focus on self-support in my blog and sort of thematically within myself is to build a solid foundation for myself, because already I have experienced multiple times where I have gotten "ahead of myself" or sort of "flown too high" to where I end up then feeling unsteady and unaware, or falling hard. So sometimes the words would just really flow, and I would feel really free and open and like I was seeing really clearly. This was and is exhilarating. It's like a feeling that I can do anything, I can take on anything, I'm flying. Then I would also have times where the words were sluggish ooze that made no sense and my mind seemed muddled and my concentration was all over the place and these times were really quite difficult, because within them I have felt incapable and stupid, and I have judged myself for my seeming incapacity to see and write clearly.

Many of the times that I have had the latter experience I have identified the experience as a kind of resistance to where I have seen it as most supportive if I can push through the resistance and write in spite of the resistance, but within this my focus has almost always been on publishing what I write so as to appear consistent to others. Some of the times that I have had the latter experience, I could not honestly identify it as an experience of resistance because I felt stable, or I had other things that I identified as more important and more pertinent to self-support than writing through a muddled experience of myself. But my self-inflicted pressure for publishing remained, and I would struggle for hours trying to come up with words that seemed "good enough" which is to say that of course they were not self-honest because my whole point within writing them was to publish them not for myself but for the appearance of consistency, to where "good enough" meant that they sounded close enough to being self-honest, and after all, after a certain point, who can judge if they are really self-honest other than myself? And so I knowingly deliberately would engage in writing words that were not supportive of myself with the sole purpose of keeping up appearances. This is not to say that what I had written at these times was exactly a lie, and in fact I usually would write multiple posts in a night and only publish the one that seemed to be the closest approximation to self-honest clarity I could find in all of those attempts. But it is to say that the writing was not as self-supportive as other activities may have been for me at that moment, and it is also to say that the only reason I wrote rather than doing one of those other self-supportive activities was to have something to publish.

Here I see an opportunity to judge myself, to say that I should be able to write with clarity every day and that if I were really being self-honest then words would flow and I would walk points in my writing with ease and blah blah blah everything should be easy and because it's not, I suck and am doing things wrong.

It would be great if I was adept enough with these tools to write self-honestly every day, or to push through the resistance in a self-honest and supportive way every day. But the fact of the matter is that there are many ways to support myself and many ways to gain stability, and if, within genuine self-honesty, any of these ways seem more fitting on any given day than trying to push myself through the grueling process of writing about aspects of myself that I don't understand and therefore lack clarity, then I should engage in those ways as my daily dose of desteni.

So here I see that my relationship to my blog has become a kind of character or personality to where I limit myself within my judgments of and about myself and my writing, to where when I write within this character/personality it is impossible to really be self-honest. I see that I want to write about this character or personality but in fact I have a very limited understanding of these concepts! And so we have an example of how I might normally take on this subject within my limited understanding in pushing myself to write some grandiose post from the starting point of "that's a good topic to write about, I should write about that" rather than the starting point of experiencing the personality/character and then facing it, or the starting point of learning about the concept and then looking at myself to see it and face it.

And here just last night I had an experience wherein I was writing only to have something to publish, to where I was already originally struggling to write a blog post, then had a phone conversation with my brother, then decided to use the topic of that conversation as the theme of my post from the starting point of having something to publish so that I could remain consistent in daily publishing (note that this is not a desire to remain consistent in daily writing, which could be done without publishing). So I actually was not looking at the content of the conversation and myself within the topic of the conversation with much self-honesty, but instead was looking at what I could pull from the conversation to write some self-forgiveness on to form a post that I could publish.

Within honesty within myself I would have probably best supported myself either by writing in a free format for myself without the intention of publishing as a way to process the conversation, the content of the conversation, and my reactions, OR I could have simply gone to bed as it was a good time to go to bed and really that was what I wanted to do and what made most sense to support myself.

So I see how engaging with this "personality/character," even without fully understanding the concept of a personality/character, is in fact the opposite of supportive of myself within self-honesty and self-responsibility: engaging in my writing within and as what I have defined as this personality/character is self-sabotage and self-abuse, to where I am exercising and practicing my writing from a starting point that is not aligned with what is best for all and therefore am strengthening this personality/character, and I am judging myself to where I am accepting and allowing myself to experience myself as inept, incapable, stupid, and a failure for not having clarity within my writing.

I do have to wonder if I will ever always have clarity in my writing, and I have to watch myself for using a lack of clarity as a reason to "support myself" in some way other than writing in any given moment. I am sure that some of the most self-supportive writing sometimes or maybe even often comes out of an initial lack of clarity and then a breakthrough within the writing to self-honesty and self-responsibility. However, as I am building self-support, I want to re-prioritize some of my focus to where when and as I see myself really struggling within a blog post to where I see that my primary motivation for writing is to publish for consistency rather than to actually honestly look at a point within myself, I can move to other forms of self-support to assist myself in gaining stability within self-honesty and self-responsibility. Within this, I suspect that I will then have a much easier time returning to my writing from a starting point of self-support through self-honesty and self-responsibility.

1. Focus on my breath and my self-support in daily lived application 
2. Focus on supporting myself in daily living (a post to come delineating what this practically means) 
3. DIP Lite 
4. Write for me 
• Which may or may not include this blog 
5. Consume desteni material 
• Via articles and videos and interviews 
• Read other blogs that seem supportive to me and learning to trust myself 
6. Assess and integrate what I learn through taking notes and organizing material into a framework that makes sense for me 
7. Reach out and participate on the forums 

I think that it will also be important for me to eradicate the tendency to identify all instances wherein I "struggle" within my writing as merely "resistance" and to specify the times that I am really trying to write but am just not having what I experience as "success" in "cutting through the bullshit" to really see the points and myself honestly and clearly. Here I can see if I am not writing to support myself, and I can try to look at the starting point of my writing. Maybe often it will come up that my starting point is the desire to publish every day, but maybe within this process of looking at myself I will discover other starting points I did not realize or see that are also hindering my ability to write in a way that supports myself.


Thanks to Kristina for this supportive post.