Perfectionism, Fear, and Blogging (in which we go meta)
Blogging is difficult for me, especially when it comes to doing so on a regular basis. I've generally told myself that this is simply because I am a Busy Adult With Many Important Things To Do, and at least to some extent lately this is true enough: I've had a lot of huge things going on (all good, thankfully!) in pretty much every area of my life over the last year, and those have claimed a large degree of my time. But these are special occurrences, and the truth of the matter is that my difficulty writing is anything but. Upon digging beneath the superficial excuses I make for myself, the reality, I find, is that my difficulty in writing largely stems from two perniciously interrelated factors: perfectionism on the one hand, and fear of vulnerability on the other. I am an academic by training, and my first language when it comes to writing is that of the research paper. Blogging is a rather different type of writing, but every time I begin to type a p...