Talking to yourself. Some people do it from time to time, but “only children” do it a lot! My dad always told me, “as long you don’t start answering back there is no need to worry”……. Thanks dad.

I mean, just imagine growing up having to entertain yourself, you would do it too. Don’t worry I loved being an only child but I always longed for a brother or sister that I could talk to. Its not like I didn’t have friends I could bounce thoughts off of….only children just tend to have a bit of independency about them. We lack having someone readily available at all times who just gets you immediately with out you having to explain yourself, and growing up without a sibling just meant that you had to be imaginative. We adapt.

I have met several people in my life who have grown up without any siblings and we have laughed about the circumstances that surround the moment when someone catches you carrying out a full thought process aloud. I admit sometimes I humor myself when I have been driving down the road for a good 10 minutes talking out loud, swinging my hands around, before I realize I am at a stop light and the driver next to me is giving me a funny look because no one else is in the car. Or when my other half is gone and I am having a full out conversation with the dog. Yup that happens. Heck, he caught me once sorting laundry out loud and thought it was hilarious, he peeked around the corner as I was going “whites…colors…whites….darks…”, he just laughed and shook his head as if that was strange enough! Of course we are talking about a guy that thinks about almost every word before it comes out of his mouth. Me on the other hand, I have a tendency of not filtering myself as well.

Think of it like this, I am journaling out loud. Instead of writing down my thoughts and working them out in my head, I am simply working them out to myself in spoken form. I think that has hindered my ability to keep a journal my entire life. I have always bought notebooks or journals with all intents and purposes of writing a daily or weekly entry to one day be able to reflect on, or to thoroughly process a problem or question that I need to work through. This process of journaling was almost a right of passage as teenage girl and I sucked at it. I would sit down on the first day with 100 blank pages in front of me and I’d write the date on the top line. Then I would blank. I struggled coming up with something I hadn’t already processed, so I would decide to start at the beginning of my day and it ends up being a log instead of a journal entry every time. I would then get discouraged after day 2 or 3, set the book aside, come back a week later and read my first entry. It’s crap. It’s nonsense, there is no insight into my head, but instead it’s a play by play of what I did that day…..that’s not my idea of writing, that sounds more like a teenager’s Facebook post to me.

I have always loved to write, albeit essays or critiques, book reports were my favorite, but I have always struggled with writing freely for myself. I have definitely discovered that I work best with a deadline and/or a subject, and I tend to be a fairly guarded person, so it takes a lot for me to put pen to paper and write about the good stuff.

Now along comes the blogging world. I have found myself quickly starting to open up and write freely because I have dropped my expectations for myself. I have developed the mindset that if people want to read my stuff they will. I have set a loose deadline in my head to write at least once a week and if I don’t get something out there I feel guilty for letting my readers down. Blogging, although recent for My Wilder Ride I have dabbled in it a bit in the past, has allowed me to keep a “journal.” I am consciously thinking about good content and what I can write about based off my everyday life that people can relate to or enjoy. It holds me accountable. It makes me think about my day in a more general sense, and from time to time I will stop my “out loud processing” and take a mental note to explore that subject more later on. I seem to be able to explore it in a more personally impersonal way. I write down my thoughts first and then transform them into what a complete stranger wants to read. I strongly encourage writing anything down. It doesn’t have to be a journal with a story in every entry, just write down your random thoughts and expand on them later when you feel you need to.

You don’t write because you want to say something, You write because you have something to say.

~F. Scott Fitzgerald