Well, readers.. it’s been a month! This year on June 4th, I decided to write my very first blog. The date is now July 3rd, 2017. Which means just about a month’s time has passed, and I have some thoughts to share on blogging. In the past 29 days I’ve had about a dozen or so of my family and friends reach out to me about deepseaparenting.com. Sometimes I’d have pretty deep conversations, and other times it was just a short “hey, i like what you’re doing, keep it up.” kind of conversation.

In the beginning, it was a relief to get some things off of my chest and put them into words to share. It was something I had been craving for a long time and it was definitely overdue. However, after a little bit of blog reflection, I did find myself running into some problems.

In the past month I’ve had about 2k hits on my page. Which is relatively small, but I’m not here to try and reach numbers… this is something I had to actually remind myself of, constantly. Before I started this blog I had a list of things I wanted to talk about, I had blog subjects scheduled for 2-3 months out. Slowly by slowly I started crossing things off this list until I was down to about 3 weeks worth of scheduled blogs. I went through my calendar thinking, “Do people really need to know this? Is this too much of a downer? Too negative? Will people even read this?” These are the kinds of thoughts that crossed my mind. The same kinds of thoughts that run through my mind before posting statuses on Facebook. Earth to Ari, this isn’t Facebook. This us supposed to be your personal blog!

Somewhere along the way I had forgotten the whole purpose of why I started this blog. Which was to be transparent. To put myself out there and share my stories, my horrors, my triumphs, etc. I literally have enough truthfully sad stories of things that have happened to me, enough to make up an entire television series. I say this because shortly after sharing my life story with any special human, I usually get a response like “that sounds like something you’d see on a bad tv drama”.

I would type, type, type, and then backspace, backspace, backspace. Anxiety kicked in and I started thinking, “What if people get sick of my shit? What if they get tired of sad stories?” *sigh* Worrying about what other people might think again, are we? It’s a horrible habit I’ve acquired after having one too many people share their thoughts with me on how they think I should act or what I should and should not say. Also a result of my listening to those people. *eye roll*

Not only did I lose my sense of direction, but I also lost some confidence this past month. For example, I had promised to post a Vlog. Which I actually did record, I took out my camera and talked at it. It was super weird for me, honestly. Sitting in a room all alone, with a big light shining on my face and a just talking to no one. After talking at the camera for an hour, I looked back at the footage and did not like what I saw. Due to my pregnancy, I’ve had to stop wearing my engagement ring because my body has just become sore and swollen. So you can imagine what my face looked like in the video that night I decided to Vlog. (Totally being the opposite of transparent in these moments) My battle with self confidence isn’t that much of a challenge. I know I’m not the smallest, most beautiful thing in the world. But I also know I’m not exactly revolting and hideous either.

To end, I need to thank my therapist that I have become consistent with self reflection, because I’ve learned a lot this month. I have reminded myself of my blog’s purpose. I have to decided to share those dark and lonely stories because I got myself out of them and I worked my ass off to do so. I am going to film a vlog (or two) regardless of what this pregnancy is doing to my body. I figure that if people don’t want to read about my stories, my hardships and how I survived them, then you know what? They probably shouldn’t be on my blog in the first place. Sorry, but this is not the place for people who have had perfect sunshiny childhoods and parents who never lifted a finger, let alone their voices at one another. Unless these people want to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence. 

Let me tell you, it isn’t necessarily greener, but it probably has a little more growth.

Ari.