Catching Up & Coming Clean

Okay, so I have to admit that I haven't been completely truthful in my blogging recently. On the very top of several of my posts there has been a blatant lie. You see, one of the marvelous features of this blog is that I can manually set the date and time of any post to whatever I choose, and I've taken advantage of this feature more than once in the past several days. Why? Because I wanted it to look like I had actually written a post every day. That is, after all, one of my Lenten experiments: to blog every day. The truth is, though, that while I have thought about blogging every day, and have stared at an the empty text box of a new blog post every night before going to bed, I have not actually written every day. There have been a handful of times when the old shadow won, when I succumbed to whatever it is in me that keeps me from this task, when I gave in to the very thing that I'm trying to conquer through this experiment. I knew from the outset that this would be a battle and that it would not be easy. What I did not know is that I would care so much about exposing my battle wounds and scars to the world. There's still a part of me that wants to present a complete package: a thorough, thoughtful, and edited post neatly stamped with each successive date, no gaps, no holes, no misses, no failures. I want my efforts to look like success, even when they are a struggle. And I think this urge in me, the desire to cloak the weakness and the failure, is not so far removed from the thing that keeps me from writing in the first place. Which is why I'm choosing to write on this topic, why I am exposing my own fraud. It probably matters little to anyone but me that I've been fudging the dates, but to me it does matter. The irony, of course, is that part of the reason for blogging every day, rather than just writing or journaling, is that a blog is in the public eye and therefore presumably carries a certain level of accountability that more private writing does not. I found a way to bypass that accountability, but now I am caught up, and I am coming clean. No more hiding my mess, no matter how messy. Instead, I will continue my attempt to follow through on my original intent and I will endeavor to focus on the process, not the final product. If I miss a day, I miss it, but I will let the dates from here forward be true. Not that you have any way of really knowing, of course . . .