Post a Week Challenge - Why I am doing it

How did I start blogging?  What was it that inspired me to write and share my private journey through life to the public readers?

I have been a journal writer for quite a long time; I've been writing since I was in high school.  But these remained "for my eyes only" and took it as a violation of my rights to privacy when I find out that someone has been sneaking on my journal notebooks.

Although for some people I appear to be an extrovert, an easy-go-lucky type of person, but the truth is I am more inclined to keep things to myself, keeping private the thoughts that accompany me in all of my undertakings in life. 

Then there came a time when I realized that sharing them with others not only relieved my anxieties of being unable to meet up to my perfectionist standards on myself.  These conversations opened up my eyes to the reality that I wasn't alone in this journey.  There are many others traversing parallel paths to the one I chose to take.  Most of them even have crossed my path several times.

Opening up my private thoughts about what I experienced in life was, at first, a scary step to take. Later on, with constant encouragement from friends, and the impact this had on me and also to those I've shared stories with, I decided to start blogging.

As I have mentioned in my very first blog post, the book Leaving A Trace pushed me further to continue writing and sharing these thoughts and writings in public.

While writing in my journal notebooks came easy for me, publishing them for a public reader was not THAT easy at all.  I still continued to keep handwritten journals while striving to build this blog site as some sort of an online journal.  Statistics on blogs I've posted here compared to what I have written in my journal notebooks is so incomparable.  While I now have an additional ten journal notebooks filled with handwritten stories and insights from reflections, I was only able to post around 42 blogs for the past 5 years!!!  I even had only one entry posted in 2010. 

I want to be a writer.  And a good one at that.

I want to write a book, lots of it.  But to become what I want to be and do things I really want to do I know I need to overcome these challenging obstacles to blogging regularly.  As somebody once told me, the only way to conquer my fear is to do exactly what I fear most.

With this in mind, I decided to take this challenge -- to blog regularly and more frequently, and conquer whatever fear I have in writing and in writing for a public reader. 

I intend to post twice a week for the remaining months of 2011.  I want to beat my track record of blogs posted in 2008 and push all these fears away, too.