My great-grandparents were world travelers. When my family would visit their post-retirement home on the west coast of Florida, I would spend hours sifting through the wall of cabinets that held all of the treasures from their adventures. There were dolls from Mexico, delicate jewelry boxes from China, wood carvings from Scandinavia, and countless other baubles from far away places. By the time they were in their late-eighties, they would let us kids each choose an item to take home because they knew they couldn’t take such treasures with them on their next adventure.
Their daughter – my grandmother, passed away this summer. As her children and grandchildren sorted through her worldly belongings, we came across some items that were once housed in that wall of cabinets. My father and aunts insisted that us children take anything we wanted – whether it be for practical use or for sentimental reasons.
I ended up with an assortment of items, some pictured here. An unfinished needlework, silver tongs, a hand-stitched table cloth, well-used measuring cups, and a paperweight featuring my grandmother’s senior year portrait. Of all the items, the unfinished needlework project of Michigan resinates the most with me. It was buried within an ancient sewing box so I doubt she was recently working on it but a needle and thread were still attached. To be honest, I am not sure why I am so drawn to it. Was it a practice piece? Did she mess up and decide to start over? Did she ever intend work on it again? Perhaps I wanted it because it reminds me of my own start-and-stop nature of so many projects.
I feel like this blog is one of those start-and-stop projects. When I first started writing years ago, I had no plans to grow an audience. I wrote simply to write. Along the way, I became disenchanted with the competitive nature of blogging. I also became crippled by my own self-doubt and talked myself out of writing about so many things. I felt like that if I wasn’t being authentic, then what is the point of even writing? I would write a blog post here and there and even contemplated deleting everything – all while feeling a bit like a loser because it was quite silly to write about my non-extradinary life. I hadn’t accomplished anything worthwhile. It appeared that I didn’t have a great story to tell. I wasn’t the best writer. I wasn’t the best anything. I wasn’t contributing to society by writing on this silly little blog. I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I wasn’t.
At my first ‘real-world’ job with my first blog seen on the monstrosity of a computer.
Rather than doing my usual routine of ending a blog and starting another (a’la The Sour Patch Kid Experiment and My Goal is Simple), I am simply pushing forward in this space and no longer letting fear dictate my actions. Somewhere along the way, I lost my moxie. So from this point forward, I am determined to find it and plan to document my journey here. I will no longer talk myself out of writing because I somehow convince myself that I don’t have anything to say that people will want to consume. To hell with that mind set. I invite you to follow along. Or not.
I don’t know yet what the wall of cabinets will hold for my children and grandchildren. But I am excited to find out.
