Toot Toot
Wedding anniversaries have always struck me as a very private thing. While weddings are often very public celebrations of a couple’s commitment to each other, anniversaries feel, to me, like they ought to be a very private celebration of each year together. No one truly knows what goes on in a relationship except for the people involved. No one except the couple knows how hard they worked (or didn’t work) on their relationship to make it through another year. It seems odd and somehow intrusive to send an anniversary card to a couple just because I happen to know the date they got married. I cannot say for sure as I am not married or in a relationship, but I think if I were and I got anniversary cards from a bunch of people I would be like, “Weird. Thank you for keeping track of the day that my partner and I made it official and started boning with impunity.”
I, obviously, have the mind of a pubescent teenager when it comes to such things. Apologies to those more genteel than myself.
I never send anniversary cards to anyone in my life. This is not because I do not care, but because, as stated, it feels intrusive. Apologies again to any friends or family who have ever felt slighted because I did not acknowledge an anniversary. Just trying to respect your privacy, kids.
That being said, I am all for people celebrating their own anniversaries. If they choose to do so publicly with a party, awesome, and if invited I will be there to celebrate with them. But likewise if they choose to celebrate privately, I’m all for that too. It’s a very personal thing and should not come with obligations for anyone to celebrate in any particular way.
This week marks one year since I first started writing my weekly blogs. Minus a few weeks that I took off for holidays or vacation, I managed to write and post a piece every week for a whole year. That is an anniversary worth celebrating and I choose to do so publicly.
For those of you who have been with me from the beginning, you may recall that my first post was about wanting to be a writer, not just dream about being a writer. And I figured that the best way to go about being a writer was to, well, write with a certain degree of regularity.
If there is one thing I know about myself it is that I function best under a deadline. That is when I am my most productive. Ever since middle school and all the way through graduate school, my best work was done the night (or the very early morning) before something was due. Even when I started writing a paper earlier I inevitably deleted everything and started over when it was down to the wire. I don’t know what it is, but there is some wiring in my brain that prevents me from working unless I have a deadline, a grade, the prospect of getting fired looming over my head. Surely this cannot be healthy for my blood pressure or stress hormones, but here we are.
Another thing I know about myself is that I am obsessive-compulsive. In most ways this is annoying and complicates my daily life, but there are a few benefits to being mentally ill. One of those benefits is that I know if I tell my brain I HAVE to do something OR ELSE (insert horrible and nonsensical consequence here), I will get it done. For example, a few weeks ago I wanted to order from Outback for dinner, but I had no real reason to as I had food in the house and wasn’t particularly pressed for time. I said to myself, “Self, if you hit your steps for the day, then you can order Outback for dinner.” Thusly I found myself jogging back and forth between my bedroom and my kitchen over and over again just so I could be lazy and not cook for myself. If I hadn’t hit my steps, then something horrible would have happened if I still ordered dinner, but since I did hit my step goal, it was safe to DoorDash. This, my friends, is the logic of the obsessive-compulsive.
Flawed though the logic may be, it has helped me over this past year to be consistent. Every weekend when I think out my plan for my two days off it has not been a question of “will I write” but “when will I write?” Writing has become a habit much more easily than I expected.
One thing I worried about when I started out was running out of ideas. I don’t write fiction, unless you count my daydreams about becoming a famous comedian or retiring at the age of 37 and spending the rest of my days crafting and reading and bingeing TV and movies. (Oh, if it were only possible. Sigh.) The things I write about are my actual experiences, weird thoughts I’ve had, annoying people I’ve met. I worried that the well would dry up and I wouldn’t even make it through six months of writing every week. While not every topic has been a winner, rare is the time that I sit down to write and nothing comes to mind. Even with everything I’ve already produced, there is still more sloshing around in my brain just waiting to dance out through my fingertips. Life is just crazy and inspiring enough to keep the ideas coming.
As you might be able to tell from the many topics I’ve covered and great personal detail I have shared, I really do not care what people think of what I have to say. If you find yourself having trouble saying what you really think, I cannot recommend a mental breakdown highly enough. It forces you to decide what you actually care about and makes you advocate for what you feel strongly about in ways that nothing else ever has, at least for me. I wasn’t born with self-confidence and haven’t managed to pick much of it up along the way in life, but I do have a robust collection of “I don’t give a shit” which tends to mean when asked my opinion, I give my actual opinion. When I need something, I ask for it. When I’m sad or anxious or pissed off, I tell people. And I don’t care if they think I’m dramatic or emotional or fragile or share too much. “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam.” So sayeth Popeye, and so say I.
Having this attitude going into writing and posting online, I will admit to wondering how it would be received. I thought perhaps people would disagree with me and my choices and I would hear a lot of negative feedback. Maybe there are people who disagree with me and have blocked my posts from coming up on their feeds, but they haven’t bothered to tell me about it. I regularly hear from someone that they enjoyed my post this week, or last week, or whenever. While I started this project for myself and because I wanted to, it is gratifying to receive good feedback and be so bracingly supported by those around me.
This project has taken a lot of time and effort. There are times when “I hate writing, but I love having written,” a quote attributed to many a writer. I am proud to include myself on the list of those who experience that confounding contradiction because it makes me feel even more like what I’ve always wanted to be: a writer.
The traditional gift for the first wedding anniversary is paper. Were I not concerned about wastefulness and the environment, I would consider printing out all of my posts from this past year and putting them all in a stack. I would hold it in my hands, feel the heft and the weight of all of the words I’ve put together over the last year. And I would be proud of myself and what I’ve done simply because I decided to do it.
I’m not one to toot my own horn, but TOOT TOOT, motherfuckers! Here’s to another year of wrangling up all the unpublished thoughts.
