The end of blogging as we know it

In my twenties I was an interior decorator. It sounds like a glamorous job, but it essence most clients just wanted new curtains that matched the sofa, or their couch re-upholstered in the same fabric they had twenty years ago. I didn’t mind the job, but my urge to be creative wasn’t being satisfied.

During those years in the late eighties, early nineties, I used to go twice a week to the Noosa Arts Amateur Dramatic Society and act in plays. The one I remember most is Extremities, a play about a would be rape victim who turns the tables on her attackers. I wasn’t the lead, just one of her friends. I loved the theatre.

So it is no surprise that I ended up at University studying a Bachelor of Creative Arts in 1991. I wasn’t an acting major, I chose drama instead. I knew that if I had a background in theory as well as practice my career options would be broader.

You see I knew I was a good actress — I could learn my lines without faltering and I was confident enough to have a certain amount of charisma — but I wasn’t a great actress. In an industry where only the best survive, I quickly realised that being good wasn’t enough. When a director has so much choice for a role, the most brilliant will always get picked. I was a small fish in a very big pond filled with much more colourful and exotic fish.

Eventually I found my feet as a stage manager, one of those highly organised, disciplined people who keep all the creative personalities in line. I was good at schedules, at keeping rehearsals on time and supporting the artists. I was a brilliant stage manager and my talent took me all over the world and into a senior management position at one of the world’s most famous theatres.

I’m having the same feeling about my blog as I did my acting career. There are so many brilliant blogs out there that give advice on how to eat intuitively, honour your body, love yourself and take risks that my voice is a very small fish in a gigantic ocean. I am good, but I am not a superstar.

To be honest, I am exhausted from hearing the same messages over and over from a variety of sources (including myself). It is like being in church and hearing the minister preach the same sermon every week with just slight variations (which is what they actually do). I am saturated with advice on how to love myself, trust myself, and live with an open heart. There aren’t many stories, just sermons.

So I’ve been thinking long and hard about this blog. I am considering closing it down and walking away. Everything I have to say I’ve already said (more than once). I feel like I have nothing new to say anymore.

So I’m at a crossroads, trying to decide which direction to take or if I should just pack my bags and head home. This is not a veiled plea to get you all to leave comments saying “don’t go”, I promise.

I’m just saying that I might give up writing here, I might write about something entirely different in the future or I might just go back to the idea of this being my diary of day-to-day life.

I’m tired of dwelling on the past … it’s time to live in the present. So I’ll see you soon, later, or maybe not at all …

Thought for the day (totally unrelated)

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, and weight. ~ Women Who Run With the Wolves