I Am Boring

Yesterday was one of those days where I didn't feel like blogging. This rarely happens. I do not blog every day because someone tells me to. I blog every day because I love it and because I think it is good for me as a person and as a writer. But yesterday, blogging felt like pure drudgery. It felt pointless. Meaningless. I didn't want to do it. But because I am not good at giving myself a break, I blogged anyway. I wrote a short and sweet post about second chances. I meant every word I wrote. I always do. And the post felt good - and effortless - because it was not about me. Boring oldish me.

One of my biggest fears in life is that I am boring. Truth be told, I don't think about this fear often. But every now and then I do, and it plagues me. Yesterday was one of those days. I took that impossible step back, I looked at Me and confirmed it. Yup, I'm boring. I emailed Lindsey and said, "I know this sounds weird but I am bored of myself." She wrote back and said she has felt the same thing before. It is good to know that I am not alone.

I am married, happily married, I have two kids whom I adore, I love my extended family, I am renovating a home, I am shuttling back and forth between school and music classes. Hardly a sob story. These are all wonderful things. I wouldn't trade a single one of them, but sometimes it all just seems so, well, boring.

And then after deciding that I was the most uninteresting creature on the planet, something else happened last night that underscored how beige I actually am. Lindsey emailed me saying that the article for which I'd been interviewed a few weeks back had been published. Yay! This was surely what I needed to get me out of that existential Sunday funk. I clicked on over to this not-so-shabby institution's website, to the Styles section which I generally adore, and there was the article! It was a piece, well-written and interesting, on the modern parental dilemma of whether to publish photos of children online.

The article's author phoned me a few weeks ago to get my take. We spoke for a short time and like a good lawyer, my answers were safe and diplomatic and decidedly unedgy. I told him that my blog, at bottom, is about me, about my rookie career as an author, and as such I have no reason to splash the names and faces of my husband and children on it. I added that I know several other parents and bloggers who have made a different choice than I have, who publish photos and names, or some combination thereof, and that it seems to work for them.

In short, my answer was honest, well-articulated, and safe. And very, very boring. I hung up the phone, relieved that I didn't say something stupid, that I didn't let myself get pulled down a path I didn't intend to go. But I also had a hunch that this nice journalist would never in a million years quote me.

Well, I was right. Yesterday, I read through the article. I got to the end. And I was not mentioned. This did not devastate me. I did not plunge further into the depths. I smiled and nodded. Another sign.

It's official: I am boring.

But today. Today is a different beast. A better one. Today, I see things for what they are. I am who I am. I tell the truth. Despite temptations to garner a wider audience and more links and exposures in national media, I have stayed true to myself (cue the elevator music). I tell stories of my life. I pose questions that echo in my orbit. Nothing more. I talk about what concerns me even if it is inherently solipsistic or indulgent or predictable. So, for now, I vow to promptly forget that one article which wouldn't have me. I will plow forward with my life, my good life, that might not always make for dramatic material.

This is why, in my heart of hearts, I am a fiction writer. In fiction, we can go places we would never otherwise go. In fiction, we can do things that we would never otherwise do. In fiction, we can roll around in drama and make wild and woolly mistakes. As you will soon see, Quinn, the protagonist in LIFE AFTER YES, is a force to be reckoned with. No one would ever call her boring. I am glad that I can live, and live big, vicariously through Quinn and all of my characters to come.

In closing, I offer my apologies if I have periodically bored you as much as I have bored myself. I wish I could say this will change. But here, in my own little neck of the bloggy woods, I plan to continue to be Me. And that Me is what it is. Maybe painfully mainstream. Maybe a shred boring. But always full of honest thoughts, questions, big and small, and unvarnished truth.

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Do you ever worry that you are boring? Why?