For nearly two years I went through the following cycle: thinking about starting a blog, building excitement to share content and then talking myself out of it.
Everyone has challenging thoughts left unspoken based on the need to appear put together and happy every day of the week. Why? Society has shaped humans to live in fear of failure. We want to avoid judgment from others so perfection is the only answer. The truth is, even if we were all perfect we would still be judged for it. For this reason, I thought a blog would be a great platform to normalize life as beautiful, messy, amazing, difficult, stressful, exciting, depressing, and joyful all at the same time. Also, to normalize talking about it.
I got excited to write about vulnerable topics and share with whoever wished to read. It would give somebody a chance to relate and not feel alone. All of these forces were driving me to create a blog. Pretty powerful right?
The voice in my head saying, “you have no idea how to write a blog”, “your grammar and spelling isn’t very good”, “people probably won’t read it”, or “it will never be good enough” was more powerful and stopped me in my tracks every time.
The underlying factor was fear of failure. Fear of what other people may think. Fear of wasting time. Fear of not being good enough. These false narratives stood in my way for way too long. Eventually I tried altering the voices in my head by asking myself: “what if you learn to create a blog and embrace its flaws?”, “what if one person does read it and feels less alone because of it?”, “what is the worst thing that would happen if you tried and failed?”.
Fear is valid and will always be there, but it holds us back from being vulnerable and doing things we are more than capable of. For anyone who is experiencing fear of failure, I challenge you to take one step towards that fear and see what happens. Try something new or act on a lingering thought in your mind and if it doesn’t go as planned, that is beautiful.
To summarize… if you find a spelling error sorry, I guess I’m human.
Rachel, I love the way you talk about the “what if’s” of failure. Thanks for helping me take a step.
Rach, when I began my adventure articles for Outside Bozeman Magazine, the editor told me “your grammar is terrible “. Aside from that, I’ve had countless failures, but all the while constant support and love.
Not one spelling error! So proud of you for starting this!
You have listened to me talk about this for years…. haha