Random Rambling

Whenever I stop and take the time to think about where my life is headed, I stumble upon a question, a question I am sure everyone of us has asked ourselves at least once and that is am I doing what I love doing? And a follow up question hits me: what do I actually love doing? 

I tell myself and others who ask me this question that I love reading and writing but to be honest there are enough evidence out there that support my answer. I neither read nor write constantly. I do, however, have a list of books I want to read and things I want to write about and I constantly keep adding to these two lists. That is actually the only kind of reading and writing I do most of the time: write down names of books, songs and movies and ideas for writing and then read them whenever I stumble upon the lists. 

If you are someone who has read a few of my old posts, you might be familiar with my pattern. I make a bold statement or a promise to myself that I will read and write constantly and achieve my dream of one day writing my own book. And then I write for a good week or two and then disappear until my next declaration. I have lost count of how many times this cycle has repeated over the years. And this here is not the start of another one of those cycles. I am not making any promises to myself or to anyone else this time. This is just an update on where I am with the thing I claim to love doing. And my excuses. And the excuses are not explanations to others but rather for myself so that I can keep myself in check in the future and maybe guage myself as well on where I have reached and how I have changed. 

I started the year with a resolution of sorts to read at least one book per month meaning by the end of 2021 I will have read 12 books minimum. And I had a strong start. In the span of four months I read five books and I am currently on my 6th book. I am one book ahead of my goal and that is where the trouble starts. This is where the complacency starts to kick in. I haven't touched my sixth book, which I am not even half-way through in the last two weeks. That is because I know that even if I don't complete the book by the end of this month I still have a solid 30 days to keep on track with my reading goal. And also since the book I am currently reading on pdf consists of two volumes I might count that as two books when I am done with it meaning I will still be a step ahead at the end of next month. I see where the problem is and I know I have to work on it and hopefully I can overcome this soon. 

When it comes to writing I think I have the silliest of excuses. My first thought when I have an idea is to write it on my to do list and that itself is the beginning of all problems. It's because I write it on a to do list, I have that notion that it is something to be done afterwards and not instantly. Of course I don't always have the liberty of sitting down and writing whenever an idea pops into my head but still then I think I have to put in the effort to write it down somewhere in plain sight so that I can be reminded about it easily. Currently my to-do list is on my phone, but even if I am almost always on my phone and I see the reminder, I still fail to write about the idea mainly because there are too many distractions on my phone. I have tried making my home screen as minimalistic as possible so that I see only what I need to see and it was effective to an extent in the beginning when I changed the layout of my home screen. But as expected I am back to square one. And talking about expectation I think that is where my other problem is. As I am writing this it just hit me that I expect myself to fail: I just wrote 'as expected I am back to square one'. Hahaha, looks like I have to be a bit more confident about myself. 

But when I do have higher expectations from myself I let it get into my head sometimes. The thing is I am the biggest critic about my writing and therefore even when I do find the inspiration to write something most of it never makes it out there because I start correcting myself and editing my writing so that I don't offend others or even so that they like what I share. And if something does make it onto my writing pages and it doesn't get as many likes and comments as I expect I get disappointed. And that makes me more vary of sharing my writing after that and that eventually turns into not writing anything at all because I know that it's not going to have any impact on anyone. When I first started writing on this blog back in college, I was determined to keep thing going for a long time and in the beginning I even got the response I was looking for. People told me that they liked reading the things I wrote and that they were waiting for my next post. Now when I look back at it maybe people were only interested in what I wrote was because most of what I wrote back then was about my personal life that I didn't usually share openly. Slowly I started writing less about my personal life and started writing more fiction and I didn't get the response I was looking for from those pieces and honestly it was a bit disheartening. I know I shouldn't let things like this get me down as long as I am doing what I love doing but things like this does matter to people like me. I guess this is rooted deep in my personality because I am a people pleaser and very diplomatic when people ask me for my opinion on anything because I don't want to offend anyone. I think I am going off track here so I will stop here for now.