Divine Revelations in Small Places

Life is constantly surprisingly me by providing feedback on what I seem most to be struggling with at a given moment.  There are beautiful, poignant, insightful, and revelatory signposts all around me, if only I can get out of my head long enough to pay attention and see them.

Just this week I was beating myself up for not having made the time to blog in a while. I’ve got half-a-dozen half-finished posts sitting around in my drafts folder and they’ve been that way for months and months.  I occasionally open one up, poke around at the sentences, add a picture or two, and — still not satisfied — put it back into the drafts folder again.

What I think I most struggle with on this blog and in all my writing is finding the courage to be real, or, rather, to be self-revealing.

Part of that is just habit —  my bread-and-butter writing is about science and technology, where the object is to be a dispassionate observer and to not be found in your reporting — but part of it is an intrinsic part of who I am, the part that always feels a bit like an alien masquerading as a human and afraid of being caught out.  Like everyone, I suppose, I fear letting others know where my ouchies are lest they use them against me to cause me more pain.  But then again, I suppose that’s the push-pull tension writers are always struggling with:  that pressure to be revealing counterbalanced by the fear of being revealed.

This week one of my favorite bloggers opted to reveal something about herself that she feared to let her audience know.  As is so often the case, what she was afraid to show others about herself wasn’t something terrible at all. In fact, her honesty opened up a powerful discourse about vulnerability and how it plays out in all of our lives.  It led to real heartfelt communication within her blogging community and also led to better understanding about the human condition.  Really, what more can any writer want than that?

Since this blogger is also a professional writer, she occasionally passes on interesting articles about blogging and writing.  The article she sent today described exactly what I was struggling with:  how to be honest and let your readers find the real you in your writing, without being so revealing that you embarrass yourself and those close to you.  So after all the interesting conversation her post caused, and then receiving her forward on how to be real without being too revealing, I finally “heard” the message the Universe was sending me about getting back to my own half-finished postings.  All of a sudden, I was able to finish a piece I’ve struggled with for months and I posted it, then started several others.

Upon reflection, I realized just how perfectly the Universe was communicating with me this week, giving me plenty of feedback and examples of how to strike a balance between revealing too much and being entirely absent from my own writing (and blog).  Thank goodness I finally paid attention to the signs around me.

(C) Copyright PeggyMalnati  All Rights Reserved.

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