Being Brave.

This week I hit 200 followers! Yayyyy!!! Fist pump! This little blog about my incessant ramblings on writing has 200 people following it with varying degrees of interest in what I have to say. Which is odd and frightening, completely overwhelming but truly welcome.

In honour of this milestone I’m going to write about being brave. When I started the blog back in February, I didn’t think anyone would want to read it. I mean, it’s just me, sitting in my dining room, banging away on my laptop. I didn’t think I’d have any followers and certainly not to the extent where you good people take time out from your busy days to like and comment consistently on my posts. That would have been too much to hope for. I thought maybe I’d get a couple of likes here and there but the support and contribution from this blogging community has been so wonderful, that I am always compelled to write a post, even when I’m not feeling in the mood to deal with people in real life.

Before I set up my pretty blog page, I searched for blogs I liked, for stories, poetry, reviews and photos that drew me in. I never thought I could be a part of something creative and still lead my current life. I’ve written before about putting off this creative endeavor for a long time, and a lot of that was because I was afraid. Afraid of putting work out there, afraid of people’s opinions, afraid that it wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t good enough. But it is and I am, as well.

I have a voice and it deserves to be heard. I have ideas churning around in the dark and quirky place that is my imagination and I want to share them with the rest of you. Some aren’t very good but this is my space, I have to own it before others can take it seriously.

Taking that first step to create the page and to search for pages that I wanted to follow and like always put my heart in my throat. That sense of ‘what if they don’t like me or my stuff’ was on replay. Newsflash afraid self, some people won’t like you and that’s okay, but some people will and that’s even better. I still get little heart flutters when I see the little orange circle on my bell telling me I have notifications. Maybe I’m still searching for acceptance, I don’t know. What I do know is that if I wasn’t brave enough to put myself out there and put my work out there, then I would have 200 less people to share this writing journey with.

Today, I am glad I was brave.

So thank you, folks. We are just getting started.

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