Relief Well

Assignment, Part Trois:

You see what just happened there?  This assignment thing?  It has me on a bit of a roll.  The cap is off the well (again) and today my hindbrain was all up in my mental grill, the Deepwater Horizon rig of my mind.  And I am not equipped with a blowout preventer.  My head may be big, but it isn't THAT big.

More ruminations upon blogging and digital identity kept spilling over into my workday.  Much of it was inspired by the posts I chose to link in my post of yesterday, because I could not help but wonder if they were the right posts to put out there for this exercise.  By 'right' I really mean 'best'.

A common undercurrent to all the blogging I have done is one of mild anxiety.  The anxiety conjured up by always questioning whether my latest effort was my best effort, should I have written that, why did I post that?  When I am in the midst of thinking about a story idea, and writing that idea down, I am usually convinced that what I am thinking and writing about is the best thing EVER!  After all, I wouldn't bother having the thought or invest the energy in writing it out if it wasn't the best, right?

Right?

Yesterday's post is a good example.  I spent an inordinate amount of time sifting through my blog entries trying to find just the right example of what I was attempting to convey.  Constantly searching for the 'perfect' post,  I was always convinced that the next one will be better yet.  So I kept reading and reading, ping-ponging back and forth through nearly two years' worth of archived material.  It was an exhausting trip down memory lane.  In the end, I don't know if the examples I linked are necessarily the best of their type, the ne plus ultras  of each type of post I have ever written.  Honestly, it being late, me being tired and needing to wrap things up probably means I picked what I picked because it was the last one in front of me at the time.

So this is what my subconscious was working on all day: searching my memory banks, trying to compare different posts, having a few "I should have picked that one..." moments.  I worried that maybe the ideas I had in mind weren't quite matched up with the posts I used as examples.

Then again, I worry about a lot of things.  Which is among the reasons why I write so much.

Ultimately, it will not matter.  I did my best with it, and that is truly what counts.  It's all grist for the mill.  To paraphrase a saying I read recently, there is no writing, but there is rewriting.  That is a central attraction of blogging (and writing, period): this ability to rewrite, with shared input.  If I feel like I didn't quite illuminate what I had in mind, well...there's always another post.

Another post, another relief well to take the pressure off the gusher in my head.  Join me in this deep, dark ocean, won't you?