A Short Intermission

 Writing is hard. A bit on the nose to be sure, but I find that sometimes the longer I wait to start writing something—e.g. this post—the harder it seems to get my thoughts to travel from my head to the tips of my fingers and onto this digital page. Frustratingly, I tend to monologue to myself the perfectly pithy and entertaining introduction whenever I have neither access to the proper technology nor the freedom with which to obtain said access, like when I’m driving. I suppose I could always verbalize aforementioned monologue and then transcribe it later, but that’d be making my life too easy, wouldn’t it?

Even though I know that no one is a harsher critic of myself or my writing than I am, and that no one is likely to really care if one or even multiple posts are not up to par writing-wise with previous ones, I still get the paralyzing anxiety of not making myself properly or adequately understood. That’s more of a philosophical question than this blog I created for my class really merits, but my brain doesn’t seem to care to distinguish between low- and high-risk writing scenarios.

A professor I used to have would always remind me that I should never preface my writing with a negative qualifier, such as “I know it’s not great,” because it makes the person, at best, think just as poorly of your writing as you do or, at worst, not want to read it at all. He certainly had a point and I think that I’ve gotten a lot better at keeping the negative anxious thoughts inside, but sometimes pushing the anxious thoughts out of my head and into the black ether of anywhere else makes it a little easier to breathe. Ultimately, it’s a harmless coping mechanism and I think it’s ok to take my reprieves when I can.

Alright! Out intermission is over. Back to your regularly schedule educational technology programming.