Failure

I didn’t blog yesterday and I’m happy about that.

I’m not. Not really. But what do they say, fake it ‘till you make it?

I have a tendency toward certain obsessions and compulsions and when I started NaBloPoMo this year it wasn’t with the 30 days of November as my goal, it was with 101 days as my anticipated finish line. The reason for 101 is because last year I kept on going after November 30 and blogged for another 70 consecutive days. How can I do better than that this year, I asked myself, and the answer was the obvious 101 consecutive days.

One hundred and one days wasn’t a bad goal. It was nothing that would be ultimately harmful or anything like that, but for the past 10 days it had became something I felt like I had to do and I wasn’t happy with that. My belief is that there are only a few things in life we really ‘have’ to do. We have to treat people with respect, and by that I mean love the people we love and like the people we like and recognize that everyone else is pretty much just like we are with the exception of some minor cosmetic differences. We have to provide quality work for the money we receive on our jobs, and we have to help people who need help. After that it’s all electives and I was thinking that I was turning blogging from an elective into a ‘have to’ and I didn’t like that feeling. Also, I want to make quality blog postings and that’s difficult for me if I’m scrambling every day trying to think of something to write about and then having to sometimes bang some words out just for the sake of having a posting up for that day.  Because of that I decided on Friday to stop 10 days post-NaBloPoMo and let myself enjoy blogging.

So yesterday was a weird day for me because I woke up, as I have for the past 40 days, thinking that I have to blog something. I didn’t know what, but I knew I had to write somethingt. Even though I went to bed on Friday night telling myself that I was going to take Saturday off, I woke up with The Voice of Unreason  jumping up and down on my shoulder telling me I had to blog, I needed to blog, I have to blog, I should blog. After all, good people blog and I want to be good, right? And I had a record I wanted to try for and if I was a good person, a good blogger, I’d . . .

You get the idea.

I felt a little off all day yesterday, and when I finally went to sleep last night I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had failed. Rationally, I knew it wasn’t a big deal but The Voice of Unreason doesn’t care about rational thoughts. He thrives in the arena of guilt and shame. He’s sort of like Spartacus without the social conscious. Sadly, the voice who is supposed to be on my other shoulder, the one with the social conscience, must have either taken Saturday off or fallen asleep already because he was nowhere to be found.

The end of our story comes with our hero, me, having failed at his original goal but ultimately feeling all right with his decision and recognizing that it wasn’t a failure at all.