Five Years

This post, number 2415, marks the fifth anniversary of this blog: August 10, 2012 marked my first post here. I’d written hundreds of other posts on other blogs I’d started years earlier, but that first post on a blog that bore (and bears) my name seemed special. By obtaining a URL representing my name, and by committing to a year of hosting, I felt that I was doing something special. And I was. I acknowledged to myself that I called myself a writer. I’d been a writer long before that, but I was afraid to acknowledge it, for fear of being “found out” as someone who writes, but who’s not really a “writer.” A writer, in my view, was someone who wrote AND published. An author, in other words. A writer who had not been published was not serious. Not committed. Not good enough to call himself a writer. I’ve gotten over most of that. I’m serious about writing. I’m committed to writing—my writing—but I’m not sure I’m sufficiently committed to the craft that I’m willing to sacrifice a great deal of my time to improve my skills. And I’m not sure I’m truly good enough to call myself a writer, at least not good enough to consider myself a writer in the same league as one whose books I might buy. I realize that lack of self-esteem as a writer is no help to me. And I realize, from time to time, I’m better than I often think. Sometimes, I read what I’ve written and I’m delighted to have written it; proud that the words spilled from my fingers in the order they did, in just the right context and with near-perfect relation to the ideas I was trying to convey. Here’s to more of those instances of pride and delight. Five years on, I’m still writing and I’m relatively sure that will continue for the foreseeable future. As I plod along, stitching together what I’ve written in to what I hope is a coherent whole, I’ll remember to be proud on occasion that I’ve gotten this far. If nothing else, I’ve developed a modicum of discipline.