Far from Over

How does one put a number on how long a journey will take when the destination is nebulous and the journey itself truly unending? 

When I started this blog, I'd intended it to be a chronicle of my journey from lost wanderer to... more focused and purpose driven wanderer, I guess. 8 months into the year, this blog doesn't have 20 entries when it should have close to 200. I had lofty intentions when I started this journey, but I thought that they were reasonable at the time. I knew that I needed to "find myself" and I thought that this would be a useful tool in doing that. I honestly thought that once I set out, putting one foot in front of the other, that even if I stumbled it would all be chronicled here: the good, the bad, the abhorrently hideous, and I'd come out the other side with something better. In reality, my journey has been tumultuous and I've often been too self-conscious to write any of it down at all. It's hard to write in a public space, without anonymity, and be truly candid. I've "diaried" and "journalled" for years online, but those spaces, though sometimes public, were always out of the way or under the thin veil of pseudonym. There is none of that here. I post links to my entries on my Facebook for goodness sake. This is as raw and open as it gets, and I have found myself unable to rise to the medium as I imagined I would. 

I need this, though, or something like this. My head is a chaotic train wreck and I need to sort that out somewhere that isn't hidden away. Not just for myself, but so that others who are sinking might be able to swim someday as well. I have no delusion of grandeur. Mine isn't a journey that's going to inspire a revolution --it has yet to inspire even me, but I want it here for others to see in case one person can be touched by it and lifted up out of their own darkness by it. But first, I have to slay the trolls and pull myself up out of my own darkness. Can I do that in a space that everyone can see? If I stop posting links to my entries on Facebook will people even realize that I'm posting at all? Is that the way to skirt the issue of public catharsis versus private battle? How much of my life should I be sharing and how much should I keep close to my chest?

These are all questions I can not answer right now. I am going to take some steps, though, toward finding them. The first one being changing my online id as a quick Google search tells me that the one I've been using for years is now being used by some guy in Australia, too. I was shopping around in my mind for a new one, anyway, and today it came to me. So... moving away from that. Who needs a username steeped in Chaos, anyway? I'll delete what accounts I can delete, name change what accounts I want to transition (and am able to,) and leave the rest to rot in the wastes of the internet. That's a positive change I can make and one that inspires more forward momentum, I think. Onward to the future.

This journey is just beginning.