My blogging mid-life crisis

I'm working on weaning off my basic sleep medication (my entire life, sleeping has been an issue) so that means I'm awake. Actually, it's only 1030pm on a Saturday so that's not crazy. But my best friend is spending the night (yes, we're 29, but she lives in Tijuana across the border so this is easier!) and she went to bed an hour ago. So I feel like I'm up late!

I've been seeing and learning about quite a few high-quality new blogs in the OT blogosphere that I think I've recently mentioned or linked to, and I just finished reading a bunch of Katie Riley's blog posts about PR/Media. And I have a case of jealousy. I love my blog and I love writing, but I'm just such a rambler. Why write something in three words when I can write three hundred? AHAHAHAHA. I like typing out my thoughts, I like typing, and I don't like editing. I typically write a post quickly, then post it, and don't re-read it or try to make it shorter. I actually enjoy reading long posts so I don't think twice about it. Most of the time.
But then a night like tonight, after reading about talking in “sound bytes” to recorders, and being succinct, etc, I feel kind of lost and sad and stupid (and I keep hearing what sound like gun shots??!! so if this is the last post you ever see, I totally died. Hopefully not!!!! Maybe my blog will become posthumously popular though….I wonder if i can access statcounter.com from Heaven???) Just kidding. On most of it. Except the sounds, I do hear those. Moving on, did I mention succinctness is an issue, I doubt all my work on this blog, and the point, and feel like I should just start writing short little things, and that most of my blog is worthless. The problem is, not counting my summer breaks from my OT school job, I don't have much time I can give this blog, except as a therapeutic reflection tool or to keep things going. I don't have the interest or time to make this the professional blog that gets me 40,000+ hits a month and is media-friendly…it's not my personality. I wish it was. 
I know I have some long-term readers here (ie 5 years, wow), and you probably recognize I go through a mini mid-life blogging crisis every once in a while. This is one of those times where I go out and buy my blog a new convertible and a gym membership. I need to figure out how I want to approach the future. Shorter posts? Less rambly posts? Keeping rambly posts but making it so where have to click a link to read it if it's gonna be more than a paragraph? Less diversity? More diversity? More professionalism? I don't know. The point of this blog, ultimately, is to both provide as a therapeutic outlet for me AND hopefully be at times helpful to others, but how to make those two more supplementary to each other,….I repeat. I don't know. I don't know. I love redundancy too, anybody notice that I like repeating myself??? 😉 😉 Ahh, I crack me up.
So. Here's the deal. I do plan to try and add labels to future posts, and slowly start going back and adding labels to older posts (I have over 1,600 so that's not easy), but it was a recent suggestion and a good one. I think the main reason I haven't been good about labels is that I usually blog via my e-mail, so I don't have label access then. I'll try to write future posts that have more singular topics and don't go all over the place. And while I will, pessimistically, probably not succeed, as my glass is not only half-empty but cracked and ugly, I will try to think more…focusedly (apparently that's not a word but let's go with it, shall we?) AUGH MORE NOISES anyway, more focusedly, with my future posts as I rethink what this blog does for me and what it does for the OT community, if anything!
That would have been a good ending, right there. But we've established I don't do things correctly. So I want to say one last thing, that I'm also pondering on what I would like to write for another article. I know I still want to write about OT in a third-world country based on my shadowing in Bogota, Colombia, for an OT magazine. But I would also like to MORE NOISES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! write some things for some mainstream publications….like Anne Zachry (sp?) is doing over in Memphis. She rocks. 
Finally, Jan Olsen of Handwriting without Tears was mentioned in this month's Costco Connection, which just came and I would have eventually read and discovered myself, but my mom saw it first and let me know. 🙂 
There. Now let's stop at this awkward junction, shall we??? 
Happy Olympics 🙂 
PS1: Watching the Olympics tonight, I was thinking that the 37 year old Australian sand volleyball player was lucky to still have full uses of her shoulders and if she has had rotator cuff issues in the past….these are the things OTs think about.
PS2: I'll admit it, I shamelessly am begging for comments telling me what you do and do not want to see, what you do and do not like, etc…
PS3: Even on my most doubt-filled days of my own professional worth, I never doubt for a second that the IDEALS of occupational therapy – OT at its best – are absolutely phenomenal. 
PS4: I have scheduled a lost of posts for the future so who knows what's coming in the days to come.
PS5: I have several product review blog posts coming up – on Dycem, PenAgain, Classroom Solutions Foot Fidgets, in the weeks to come. 
PS6: Remember what I said about rambling???? 😡 
Jul 29, 2012 | Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none