Dear WordPress

Dear WordPress,

I have a confession: you make me highly uncomfortable.  The idea of blogging actually terrifies me.  I am someone who definitely likes to express my opinion and always has hundreds of words on the tip of my tongue, and yet when I go to blog I have a great deal of difficulty doing so.

This is probably me just being silly, but I can’t help it.

The main reason why I am so scared is probably because of the nature of why I blog.  The things that I post online are things I spend a great deal of time thinking about.  I am extremely self-conscious about my thoughts, most specifically when it is regarding teaching.

I feel like I know nothing, most of the time.  I am surrounded by people who know so much and I find my thoughts are insignificant to theirs.  I have so much to learn, and I am so grateful to be surrounded by people to learn from.

Technology has truly propelled me into learning how educators feel about many things.  I read a lot of blogs, and feel very relieved when I find my thoughts are similar to people who are actually out there teaching.

While blogging seems to put me out of my comfort zone, which makes little sense as I have been a social networking addict for as long as I can remember, it also helps me a lot.  It is a huge stress reliever for me, and also a huge procrastination tool.

When I first started the blog it was for an education class, and after it was done I thought I would never blog again.  When school started to get really stressful however I decided it was the best place of release and did a single post.  I poured a large amount of thoughts into one post, and loved the fact that all my thoughts were gone from my head.

The most drastic change in my outlook on blogging was when I came to a point of complete frustration in my life.  I felt like I couldn’t talk about it with anyone but also needed to drastically.  My decision to blog it came because I knew that it didn’t really matter if anyone actually read it, the point was that there is a possibility that millions of people could read it, and chances are I barely know any of them.

I have started to try and use my blog more regularly now, and it again came from a moment when I didn’t know how to respond to a situation and blogged away my frustrations.  My blog has created a place for me to reflect on a lot of my thoughts and feelings in a very positive way.  I actually had to make myself not go on WordPress the last couple of weeks, so that I would actually study for finals.

So WordPress, thank you, and because you do so much for me, I am going to continue to put myself out of my comfort zone.  I’m not comfortable with you yet, but I’m working on it.

With all my love,

Samantha Douglas