Getting Off the Dime

I was at the pool the other day watching my kids swim and talking with this friend who was there doing the same. Though she's a pretty new friend for me, we click. She's smart, funny, a little raunchy, trying to evolve, etc. We have some similarities, but she's different from me in a key way. She's a "doer". She has an idea and she moves forward with it. I too have some decent ideas, but my tendency is to think something to death and therefore never quite get off the dime with it. Fortunately, she's as generous as she is smart, and she suggested a couple of things that finally got me moving on posting something to this blog, which I set up a solid eight months ago.

Why is it that the first step of doing anything is the hardest? Actually, it isn't even the first step that I find tough, it's the anticipation leading up to taking the first step that is often the most painful part of something new - the cautious analysis, the trying to figure out all possible contingencies, the worrying. Mind you, I'm not saying that I'm this way with absolutely every first step I take, but if the thing involves exposing my soft, fleshy underbelly in the process, the pre-first step fretting over whether I might end up making big mistakes or looking stupid can overwhelm. And, to me, few things scream vulnerable quite like writing down my most intimate thoughts, hitting enter, and letting the world in on what's rattling around in my brain.

I've been telling myself for a long time that I want to write. Let me back up and get the basics out of the way. I've been a stay-at-home Mom to my two daughters for the past 8 years, am a former lobbyist, am reasonably intelligent, and also feeling a bit rudderless in my world where a lot of my life is centered around tending to the needs of impatient children who can't begin to appreciate the sacrifices I've made on their behalf. Though that, thank God, is improving as they age, well, until they reach their teen years and become as obnoxious to their stupid parents as I was to mine. I think I might have six more decent years before the combined hormonal surges of a pre-menopausal mother and two teen aged daughters in our house send us all screaming for the exits. But I digress.

Like I said, I want to be a writer. But what to write? I am not interested in writing fiction, and the part of me that questions why the blogoshpere needs one more voice adding to the din wonders whether I have anything to say that's worth reading. In my mind, the only way to get anywhere close to that is to write about what I know, and the thing that's been a constant for me for as long as I can remember is my struggle to find balance, and then to hold it for any reasonable period of time. Sometimes I nail it, and sometimes it's completely FUBAR. So my posts, and there is an entire universe of potential topics here, will be tied to that idea, even if the binds seem loose.

If I end up being the only one who reads this, so be it. I'm glad to have finally taken the first step.