It wasn’t until December 8 that I checked Feedspot’s list of 80 best blogs on PTSD. I was astounded to find that I was #15, and they said something wonderful about my blog.
Jenny Deupree is a writer and artist who shares her experiences with healing from PTSD on her website. She also writes about other topics such as spirituality, social justice, and the importance of meaning in one’s life. Her website is insightful and moving. She is a brave and inspiring person who is using her writing to help others.
O MY! could that really be true? It’s not a friend “just being nice.” It’s a professional, who knows something about writing, who sees this in my blog. Suddenly I felt something solid under my feet, a place to stand. It felt great.
But then I thought about starting work on another blog post. O my god, what if I can’t write anything good enough? So I haven’t started one until today, December 15. And I decided to just write the truth. It may not be good enough, but I don’t care. I was already thinking this, but then I got a big boost from Elizabeth Gilbert.
Now, today, I’ve been reading Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, and found this:
“… the only thing the ego wants is reward, reward, and more reward. … I know that my soul doesn’t care a whit about reward or failure. My soul is not guided by dreams of praise or fears of criticism. My soul doesn’t even have a language for such notions. My soul, when I attend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will even be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. pp249-250
That’s why I always feel good when I see the moon, when I teach a folk dance, when I publish a post to my blog. I don’t even care whether anybody reads it — or at least that’s true most days.
So right now I’m feeling enormous gratitude: to the night sky, to Elizabeth Gilbert, and to who ever wrote that piece about my blog on Feedspot.