Changes

I have been thinking a lot about my blog lately.  I really enjoy keeping a blog and documenting the things that I do with my family.  My fear is that I don't document many of my feelings or emotions about the events.  I would like for my blog to be more than just a travel-log of the Taylor family.  Before I started this blog, I wrote weekly emails and sent them to family members and friends who didn't live close by.  I found that I would edit out my feelings and thoughts to keep the content happy and politically correct.  Occasionally I would write about my emotions, but I wouldn't send that part of the email out. 

This is where I have struggled with the idea of a public journal.  I want to and need to put more about me in these posts, but I am afraid of exposing myself or offending someone for how I feel about something.  I am not a mean person, but sometimes I have emotions and thoughts about how people behave or about things that happen to me and I feel that by not writing about these emotions, my personality and personal history gets lost. 

I intend for my blog to be more about me from now on.  I want this to be more than a series of what I did and who went with me.  I won't stop posting about what I did, but now and again, I want to include why I did what I did, how I felt about it and possibly what I learned from the experience. 

 I want people who read my blog to understand and know me better.  When I print out this blog,  I intend for my children to read it and I want them to know more about me, not just where I took them.  To facilitate this, I am starting a series of my personal history and other things about me.  My goal is to answer around four to eight questions about myself weekly.  I hope to do this every Sunday and have it ready to post by Monday.  I will make it a point to not only answer the question, but to also explain my answer.  If the question is what my favorite color is, I want to explain why that color is my favorite, not just give a one word answer. 

A wonderful quotation gave me the energy to go forward with the idea of writing more about how I feel and being honest with my emotions.  Here it is:

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."  -Dr. Seuss

 I really struggle with voicing my thoughts sometimes.   I especially struggle expressing my thoughts in writing.  I know that I am not a wonderful writer, I've never sought out to be an author, but I do enjoy writing a journal.  I know that I struggle with grammatical rules and the sort, but I am going to work on this and not worry about how others might react to my ineptitude.  This will be a good exercise for me to find my voice and be able to express myself in writing better.  Hopefully the more I do this, the easier it will become.

By the end of one year, I will have answered around 250 questions about myself.  I think that not only will this exercise help others to understand a little bit more about me, but it will help me to understand more about myself.  I am in the process of writing out questions and I will have my first series of answers ready to read next Monday, January 17. 

I was trying to figure out if I should call these Q&A posts by a series name (like Q&A week 1) but I can't decide.  While saving the document with the questions, I titled it Personal History Document.  If you take the first letters from each of these words, it spells PhD.  I love funny little things like this, so I like thinking that this could be called Sherron's PhD.