Tag: blogging

Thoughts on blogging

October 9th, 2020

It used to be that I was able to put aside self-consciousness about publishing on my blog. I published unpolished random writing exercises, outtakes of nothings on my mind, vignettes of a woman sweeping her walk at the beach.

Sometime in the recent past, maybe in the last year or so, that has changed. I have theories. One is that I feel repetitive. Another is that I got self-conscious about other people reading what I wrote. A third is that I questioned my motives — why do I need these words to be public instead of private? A final one, and probably the biggest one of 2020 — since the pandemic began, and since I began waking up to the misogyny, white supremacy, and racism that are still very much alive in the US, and since my mind is almost exclusively occupied by work and the disgraceful and horrifying state of our country and leadership — is that everything else feels insignificant in comparison.

Because of this recent self-consciousness, I haven’t been blogging much. What I’ve discovered from this is that when I don’t blog, I feel like my psychic arteries are clogged. There’s something about getting words out — not just out of my body but out into the world — that unblocks me. I guess this is what is meant by self-expression, though I don’t really know what I’m expressing when I blog. I don’t have a big message to share with the world (a fifth reason for my self-consciousness). This isn’t art, I’m not inspiring big thoughts, there’s no layered meaning to my posts, I’m not changing anyone’s life. Blogging just somehow serves as a release, like opening the windows when you’ve been shut up inside for too long.

I want my windows open. I have been shut up inside for too long.

To unclog my psychic arteries and open the windows for my pacing soul, I want to blog more, and I want to blog comfortably again, in my own skin, despite self-consciousness. To help get me out of my rut, I looked into fresh options to inspire me. I found the Brainsparker app. I used a couple of the free prompts with success, and I wanted more. They have a variety of “card packs”, including a blogger’s pack, and I was curious — what kinds of creative prompts would a blogger’s pack include? They already have a journaling pack and a writer’s pack. I wondered how Brainsparker creators perceive blogging and what kinds of prompts they thought fitting for bloggers.

When I found samples of cards from the blogger’s pack, I understood. The prompts are titles like “The best 10 ways to improve XYZ” or “The single best way to get good at XYZ.” These make me think of Buzzfeed headlines or blog posts written by companies who use blogging as part of their content strategy. I forgot that blogs can be monetized, and these are the types of titles that drive traffic, and that this is what many people think about when they think about blogging.

Needless to say, that’s not the type of blogging I do, and I suspect many of you reading also see blogging as something bigger than clickbaity headlines: blogging is writing, journaling, thinking, philosophizing, opining, sharing, teaching, expressing. The existence of this blogger’s pack and the type of prompts it provides got me to thinking about blogging in general, and what it means, and what people do it for, and what I do it for.

And here we are at a blog post wherein I realize I blog to express and release and breathe fresh air and unclog my psychic arteries. So I guess Brainsparker worked :). I definitely don’t need that blogger’s pack of prompts, but they have other packs to spark creativity that I am curious about, including colors, quotes, and a what if? pack that looks fun. There’s also a pack for photographers, and the prompts look like they might be good for writers, too.

I want to preserve this space for hope and beauty, and this post is my first step in unblocking myself to do that. For now I’ll continue to seek external inspiration and prompts until stuff starts flowing on its own. I cracked open own my prompt box again. I haven’t published anything I’ve written from the prompts, but maybe I should start, just to get me over the hump of, It’s okay to not write about the big stuff; it’s okay to write about the mundane, and maybe even beauty in the mundane, to for the very purpose of bringing a little light despite the big stuff.
Feeling vulnerable about blogging

January 13th, 2020

The self-doubt is creeping in. I’ve published 12 blog posts in a row, all written on the fly with minimal editing, and with rare exception, minimal planning. I get up, I write, I publish.

I needed to break out of a rut. I was writing privately, a lot of nothing, and frankly, I was trying too hard. I was putting pressure on myself to write a cerain way, to write a certain type, to write meaningfully, to write big ideas, to provoke thought, to write something different, to go beyond myself. I felt like I was pressing against an elastic wall, and private writing wasn’t helping me break through.

Then I said the hell with it. This isn’t working for me. I’ve got to get out of my notebooks. I’ll just write. I’ll write on my blog, and maybe sometimes something good will come out.

And for the first few days that was good. And I was good. I started getting streak notices: You’re on a 3-day streak on Butterfly Mind! Then 6-day, 10-day, 12-day. Today will be 13.

Then I made the mistake of reading my posts and I’m like, who cares? Why would I publish this instead of just hiding it safely in my journal?

I mean, I know why I did it. I know why I do it even though it’s lot safer inside my elastic-walled bubble. I am more disciplined, and I examine my work more closely when what I write might actually be read. Sometimes I even choose better words for the published post than the ones I used in the first draft. Sometimes I like what I wrote enough to give it that much care. When I publish, I’m working on the craft of writing in a way I don’t when I just dump my brain in a journal.

Still, I second guess. I see all the flaws, the mediocrity, the lack of action, or tension, or point. I try to remember that perfection is not the goal, but improvement is. If I keep writing, sometimes something special will happen.
Simplifying my blogging life

November 7th, 2018

Sometime last year I decided I wanted to separate my interests onto different blogs: one for sailing, one for gardening, one for favorite words, one for my career, and one for my reading project. I’m not sure why I did this. I think I wanted to be able to give them all different looks. I really loved the theme I chose for my sailing blog, for example. I think I also wanted to give followers a chance to follow a specific topic rather than my whole mess of flitting posts.

What ended up happening, though, was that I stopped writing. I felt segmented. I spread my (sparse) posts widely but rarely went deep. Each time I wrote something, I wondered which blog to put it on. When I switched jobs I had to remember all the places to update my bio. I had all these custom domains and subdomains to maintain and renew.

Having multiple blogs is overly complicated in an area of my life that I want to be complication-free. Blogging is my hobby, for pete’s sake. WordPress allows me to categorize for when I want to look at a stream of garden or sailing posts. There is no need for me to manage six different blogs.

So, as with many areas of my life, like switching to a tiny purse, I’m paring down. Decluttering. From now on, other than my Andrea Reads America project writeups, I’m moving all my writing back to Butterfly Mind.

I feel lighter having made this choice. It means I have a lot fewer decisions I have to make each time I sit down to write. Plus it gives me a winter project.

This January when I’m craving green leaves and bright flowers, I can turn my attention to cultivating my blog: to transplanting content, pruning categories, and maybe even changing the look of my site. Oh, and writing. I’m excited about my blog again for the first time in a quite a while.
Forging a career path… through blogging

October 3rd, 2018
As a writer and a power user of WordPress.com, landing a job with Automattic and supporting the WordPress.com blogging software was a dream come true. In addition to helping users learn how to publish their content on their own personal sites, I also got to spend my days writing. At the end of my 3.5-year tenure I had written more than 635,000 words on Automattic’s internal blogs.

As a customer support agent, I wrote internal documents on how to lean into customer frustration, reminded ourselves to under-promise and over-deliver, and recommended we say “Thank You” more than we say “I’m sorry.” As a team lead I wrote about how I approached performance reviews with my team, shared leadback survey methods and results, and wrote about how to advocate for team members through goal setting.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. All of it within our internal, private blogs.

One day, in a conversation about career development, our head of support said something to the effect of, “One of the best things anyone can do for their career is blog about what you do. All this great stuff Happiness Engineers are sharing internally — why not blog those tips publicly?”

Why not indeed.

Shortly after that, I began writing about career topics more openly on my blog, like explorations of What is a Career? and What can I contribute?

It was when I joined the Support Driven community about a year and a half into my time at Automattic where it really hit home how valuable it is to share our inside knowledge outside. As I read through the Support Driven Slack channels, I was dumbfounded: here was whole world of support professionals outside of the company I worked within — support agents, team leads, department directors — who were talking with each other and asking questions about many of the same things we talked about and wondered about within Automattic: how do you schedule weekends? How do you support a teammate who’s interacting with an abusive customer? How do you help team members control time-consuming tangents in live chat?

Here were others who might have answers! And I might have answers for them. We’re in an industry where there aren’t a lot of books about what we do. I could be helpful here.

So I started blogging more about work-related topics. And blogging led to speaking, and to helping out with conferences, and to getting to know others in the industry who have helped me along my path. I even started a spin-off career blog.

I’m not great at the career blogging stuff. I don’t lay posts out like instructional articles with headings and bullet lists like I probably should for them to be most useful. My posts are more a messy “omg here’s this thing I just realized and maybe it will help you, too” format, or they’re rough-cut because I’m limited for time. Imperfect and published is better than perfect and unpublished.

BUT. My blog has been a friend to me throughout my post-40-start-a-brand-new-career life. And here are headings and bullet lists that share why.

Writing is a form of learning
- The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to someone else.
- And what is writing about work but trying to teach a thing you know to someone else?
Maybe I can help
- In an emerging industry, where there are limited how-to or best-practices books and blogs, support professionals are hungry for resources
- I’ve written, spoken, or have the knowledge to write about some of the topics I see support pros asking about in the Support Driven Slack
Blogging expands my scope of influence
- Before Automattic, my scope of influence was limited to my blog followers (and I love you for following, thank you!)
- Within Automattic, blogging internally helped me expand beyond just my role and into parts of the whole organization
- Beyond Automattic, blogging externally helps me expand into the whole industry
This last one, about expanding my scope of influence, makes me feel squirmy because it seems nakedly ambitious. And maybe it is, and maybe I shouldn’t feel bad about that.

When I couple 1) the Automattic head of support’s advice to share our knowledge with people outside the company to help move the whole industry forward with 2) Buffer’s career framework for how individuals at Buffer advance without becoming managers, where influencing the whole industry is the highest level of impact one can attain, it makes sense to want to help and have as broad an impact as possible.

So in answer to the Support Driven Writing Challenge prompt, Do you blog about work or career related topics?, the answer is yes. It’s scary, and every time I publish, I fear ridicule, and that someone knows better, and that I’ve got it all wrong. But writing and sharing help me grow, and they hopefully help others in their terriciting growth as well.
I have a blogging problem

June 1st, 2017

I’m going on vacation today, and one of the things I’m most excited about is that I’ll have free time over the next few days to write, and to play with my blog(s). Before heading out of town, I opened my laptop to add my other sites to the menu here on Butterfly Mind, and as I added them, I realized I have five blogs. Five.

If you’re interested in sailing, gardening, words, or American literature, I’ve got blogs for you! While Butterfly Mind is the place where I share whatever thoughts alight on my screen or notebook pages, these other blogs chronicle journeys on the water, on the land, and in books:

Andrea Sails: these are the logs of our adventures on the water. The entries help me keep track of what I’m learning as I venture into this new-to-me world of wind- and human-powered boating.

Andrea’s Gardening Blog: this site is often the result of me blogging with dirt on my hands, from my phone, in the garden, right after I’ve put plants in the ground. I love having a searchable record as each month comes around where I can take a look to see what the garden was doing this time last year: what was blooming? How has everything grown since then? When did I sow those seeds?

Andrea’s Lexicon: these are words I collect that I think are cool. Sometimes I hear them in conversation, sometimes I find them in books. Most of them appeal to me because they’re fun to say. Haberdasher! See what I mean?

Andrea Reads America: this is the chronicle of my journey through the US in literature in three books per state. The three books must be set in the state and be written by an author who is from the state or who has lived in the state. For each state I am reading men, women, and non-Caucasian authors. I’m going in alphabetical order. I’m reading Michigan now, though I still need to write up my Massachusetts reads.

Alright, time for me to hit the road. I’m going to have a hard time deciding which one(s) of these to write for while I’m gone.
A lexicon

February 12th, 2017

My recent read of Alone in the Classroom got me all excited about words again. Since I can’t seem to stop with the blogs, I created a new one: Andrea’s Lexicon. Each entry is short. A word and its meaning. Enjoy :-).

Tag: blogging

Thoughts on blogging

Feeling vulnerable about blogging

Simplifying my blogging life

Forging a career path… through blogging

Writing is a form of learning

Maybe I can help

Blogging expands my scope of influence

I have a blogging problem

A lexicon