How's Your Blog Doing?

How's your blog doing?

When it comes to you and your presence on the internet, it's a common urge to phrase your answer to this question relative to how you perceive other people in your niche are doing on the internet.

Dooce has 1,548,465 followers on Twitter and The Pioneer Woman scored a cooking show on television. All I've got is a couple thousand followers and a poem in the church newsletter.


These are the walls in a room in William Faulkner's house, which I visited in December 2011.

If your kneejerk response is to find people you perceive to be more successful than yourself to overshadow the force of your own accomplishments, STOP IT.

The internet is full of people who are more popular than you and have nicer skin and have more diverse talents and know better how to match paint chips to that vintage Eames rocking chair in that reading nook in their house that is big enough to have a reading nook.

Those peope are not you who shook so hard she spilled her coffee trying to hit send when she submitted that first poem to the Church Chatter. That photographer with the amazing online classes isn't you who saved all her change from grocery shopping and the drug store until she could afford her first real DSLR camera to shoot her brother's wedding.

Not to denigrate any of the skills and accomplishments of those who we deem successful, because they worked hard to be where they are, too, but they are not you. You are the person who has faced fear and adversity in your life and done it anyway. You maybe haven't stepped up to the plate every single time, but you are still the one who's done it. When it comes to the things about which you are passionate, the things that you love, you have set a standard for hard work and success, and, if you haven't, you can set that standard now.

You might not yet have been sprinkled with fairy dust or hit upon that perfect combination of your specific skill set and content and social networking that brings hundreds of thousands of internet admirers to your yard — maybe your blog is secretly acting as a springboard into something that's not even blog-related — but you likely have the possibility of success written into the threads of what you are passionate about creating.

You don't have to be the picture of your success right now to be in a great position to foster its possibility.

Your own, actual, present success is your best guide to tell you how you are doing, and the best part? Success is not a stagnant pond. It begets itself, even in its smallest pieces, and sometimes all it takes is for you to recognize your success where you have already created it.

So, on your own terms, how's your blog doing now?

The above entry has been republished from my now-defunct domain, Ninjamatics.com. It was originally published in April 2011 and has been edited slightly for currency.

The World Has Stories to Tell Us About Ourselves If We Listen For Them

I went to little organic grocery store near my home yesterday to pick up some spinach, avocado, and parsley, because I can't get enough of the green stuff in my smoothies these days.

The trip, which covered no more than two blocks there and back, felt momentous, because it had been a full week since I had left the apartment. A particularly disgusting and painful version of the common cold had anchored me to an armchair, and while I wasn't feeling well at all yet, I needed to acknowledge the land of the living.



While I waited to pay for my groceries, I watched a little boy play with one grandmother in a small children's area outfitted with toys and books while his other grandmother chatted with the cashier.

"We asked him where he wanted to go," she said, "and he told us he wanted to come here!"

"That's so cute," the cashier said.

"This is his favourite place," the grandmother said.

This little boy's favourite place was this grocery store, and I could see why. They made him feel welcome. They gave him a place in it that he was free to use as he pleased. The woman at the sandwich counter sneaked him a chunk of carob. This corner of the grocery store had become his place, too, and he wanted to share it with people he liked.

While watching him, I realized that this is what we all want, really. We want to feel, and actually be, included. We want to be given the freedom to stake our claim to communal spaces and be accepted. And, more than finding acceptance, we want to share our good communal finds with each other and deepen those connections.

This idea, this extended welcome, is behind how I write, design, consult, and speak, but I was unable to find the right words for it until I watched a four-year-old showing his extended family how all the parts of his favourite space worked and why he liked them.

It reminded me to watch the world more closely and the stories it has to tell. Our personal narratives — the very stuff that describes our goals, beliefs, and understanding of who we are — are informed and illuminated by these stories, and they can speak profoundly to us in the smallest, incidental moments.

We Are More Than the Stories of Our Fears

I have been living with a lot of fear lately. I know I gave a whole talk on self-doubt and how to move through it so you can be greater than you know, but I'm still a huge fraidy cat, because so much of life looms so large. Some of it looms large and ugly, but even the parts that loom large and glorious are scary. I know I'm not the only one who feels this.


photo credit: Palinode

I have a lot of good things going on right now. I'm going to be the closing keynote speaker at BlogWest 2013, I'm going to be a speaker at Mom 2.0 Summit, I'm collaborating with an artist on a book right now, I have this new Three Way Death Match podcast, I am working on the highly-important-to-me #365poems project, and my design and consultation work is keeping me happy, challenged, and fed. These are all things that go in the looming-large-and-glorious camp, and yet they still scare the bejeezus out of me some days.

Can I do all of this?
Do people's expectations of me match my actual skill set?
Can I do all of this?
What if I make/say/do things, and people don't like them?
Can I really do all of this?
Do I have the strength to handle as much rejection as I might be asking for?
Can I really, really do all of this?

So, I was sitting here running through the list of all the things I could possibly fail at over the next six months when I watched this video that Jen Lee shared, "The Scared is scared", and now you have to watch it, because I said so, and it's good for you:

I'm waiting. No, really. Watch it. It's beautiful, and it's going to make you think better thoughts.

Did you watch it? Good. Now we can talk about it, because it reminded me of a couple of incredibly important things, one being this:

"When the scared feeling comes into you, the Scared is scared of things you like."

So I paused the video and thought of things I liked: I like holding hands with the Palinode under the table when we're out with friends, crunching through frozen blueberries with my back teeth, spooning with Onion, hanging out with friends from all over the world on Skype, waking up from a sleep so heavy it feels like I've just returned from an epic journey, all the shades of blue-green my dining room wall turns as the daylight shifts, and cold butter on slightly burnt toast.

I actually started to feel a little better, and then I got to what is my favourite part of the video, the point when we find out what happens after the story of Asa Bear and Toby Mouse at the pool ends:

"So, what are Asa Bear and Toby Mouse going to do when the pool closes?"

"They have so much that they can do in the winter. There are stories about winter. There are stories about other things. I have heard they once even had a sleepover."

When I am living inside my fear, it is so easy to forget that all these other stories are also going to unfold. It is so easy to forget that all these other stories will become possible both inside of and after the ones that are already happening now. It feels like a revelation every time I remember this:

Bits of yourself speak to you from your past about what happened then, and the you of now speaks to those stories about how they sit in the context of all that has happened since, and you become a powder keg of stories informing stories.

Scared is scared of the things I like, and I am more than the story of my fear.

We are all more than the stories of our fears.

And, if/when one failure or two failures or a whole avalanche of failures happens, they are not the ends of any stories, not really, because there are always, always more stories, and they've already begun somewhere, even as I felt myself falling down a hole. I just didn't know it yet.