November 2, 2008 was the date I sat down, wrote this post and hit the oft-dreaded publish button for the first time, claiming my own little spot here on the interwebs. I didn’t have much of a clue about why I was doing it or where I was going with it. I now have a pretty firm grasp on why I do it but still not the slightest idea of where it’s going.

I have learned quite a bit over the past year through blogging.

I’ve learned that pretty much no matter what I write about there is at least one person, and usually many more than just one, who reads it and comments or e-mails me to say they’ve been in the same situation or feel the exact same way. I’ve learned that I’m not alone.

I’ve learned that it is possible to develop relationships with people who follow my blog and whose blogs I follow. We have gotten to know each other. Admittedly, we never really know exactly how well we know each other since our primary interactions are through what each of us chooses to expose on our blogs and in our comments. Much can be hidden. The same can be said for people we know in life though. Some of the friends I’ve met through blogging have become facebook friends too, some I communicate with regularly via e-mail, one I have met in person. Some turned out not to be friends at all and/or not who they want people to believe they are. Some lost interest in my blog or I lost interest in theirs. Some stopped blogging and have disappeared. They have all touched me in some way and all taught me something about life or about myself.

I’ve learned a ton about social media. When I started out I had a MySpace account and one e-mail address. Today, I’m on virtually every social networking site there is. I can’t even remember all that I’ve signed up for. MySpace has been completely abandoned. Facebook is private and used primarily for people who I actually know, except my public Facebook Page for this blog. I have an endless number of e-mail addresses. I even know a little about search engine optimization, especially that anyone claiming to be a SEO guru, is in fact, NOT.

I’ve learned that there are multiple cliques within the blogging community. There is always some controversy or other brewing. These always seem to bring out the worst in people, the catty in-fighting hurts us all. This is especially true amongst “mommy-bloggers” which is, unfortunately, the category under which my blog most likely falls. I try to ignore the nonsense. It usually blows over pretty quickly and isn’t nearly as important as anyone involved thought it was.

I’ve learned that blogging is extremely time consuming and much easier to keep up with when not employed than when working full time. I’ve learned that doesn’t bother me and that I somehow find the time because I love it so much.

My most popular blog post by far is Narcissistic Mothers. My least popular post is Are Credit Scores Obsolete. I guess there a lot more people trying to understand their parents and narcissists than there are interested in credit scores or the mortgage industry. Or maybe there are just a lot more professional bloggers out there talking about credit scores and the mortgage industry so my little post didn’t cover any new ground.

That about sums up what I’ve learned this year and I hope to learn even more over the next year. Thank you to everyone who’s reading!

As always, thanks for stopping by!

When I went to the bookstore last weekend to pick up The Shack, because it has been so highly recommended by two people, I couldn’t not go into the psychology section. It’s how I roll.

I haven’t started reading the book I went there for yet because while in the psychology section, I picked up another book. Also how I roll. This book looks and sounds like your typical psych-lite, self-help book. It’s short, only 122 pages. It has a purple paperback cover and was quite possibly self-published, based on the graphics and design of the cover and book. There are even cutesy little cartoon drawings every few pages used to demonstrate specific points. Strangely, I picked it up and flipped through it for a few minutes anyway. It’s called Learning to Love Yourself: Finding Your Self-Worth. Ugh. By all accounts this book should not be of any interest to me at all. But it is. As I was leafing through it, I read a few key points that I liked.

Some of the points I read reminded me of when I first started on this whole journey to self-awareness thing. Back then the idea that I had the power to change my life simply by changing the way I think about things was a brand new concept. It was life changing. It reached me for the first time in the form of another book I would probably find objectionable (or at least way too simplistic for me) today. I’m even embarrassed to admit it now but that book was Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out by none other than the infamous Dr. Phil. You heard that right. A book written by the quackiest of all tv quacks changed my life. No, I’m not kidding and I’m not drunk (yet).

I read it in January of 2008. Only a few weeks after hubby and I separated. I know this because there was an exercise (come on, you know all self-help books have exercises) that I actually did and I have saved the e-mails. The exercise required me to ask a series of 10 questions of 5 people who I trust. The questions were all about their perceptions of me. One of them was, “Tell me what you think my strongest traits are.” I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was to send these 5 e-mails. I even put this in the subject line: “This may seem weird…”. The premise behind this exercise is a concept that is now hard-wired into my brain and that I understand completely but at the time it was completely foreign to me. It’s the concept of reframing your negative self-talk. We all talk to ourselves constantly (hopefully just in our heads) and we don’t even realize it. The tapes are recorded early on and become background noise. We don’t notice them at all. Anyway, the idea was to find out what 5 people who I care about and trust think about me in order to disprove my own negative perceptions about myself. I had to answer the questions first. Luckily none of the 5 chosen ones called the men in white coats to come take me away and were all extremely open, honest and more than willing to participate.

Their answers blew me away. I know these people well. None of them are the type to sugar coat things and they all gave me concrete examples and reasons explaining why they answered the questions the way they did. What was most striking was how similar all their answers were, when they are each from a different circle. None of them are close friends themselves. Some of them have known me since I was a kid, others I met after I’d already become a mom. They answered the questions so similarly that I couldn’t help but buy into their answers, and they were drastically different from my own answers to the same questions. I carried those e-mails around in my car for months. I still have them saved on my computer. I will never get rid of them.

Reading what they said made me start to realize just how negatively I viewed myself and also how completely off the mark I was. While that did lead to confusion, (what the hell else was I completely wrong about?!) it also lead to serious work on my part, questioning everything I thought about everything. It lead to massive personal changes, many of which I am still struggling with.

So that is why I picked up this silly little book about self-worth. Self-worth can’t be bad. The book isn’t too bad either. It’s a good idea to remind myself of some of the basics I learned from good old Dr. Phil. There are even some concepts that I hadn’t considered in the same way that they are presented in this book. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten them in my quest for enlightenment. Particularly…how we deal with anger.

Thanks for stopping by!