here i am

For a long time I've struggled with the kind of "voice" I should use on here. I read so many blogs by people who make you laugh and you know that is exactly how they sound in real life.
I've also read blogs that are so serious and questioning in their entirety that they make you ponder the small bits of life and try to make you find meaning in everything.
So where does that leave me?

I started blogging when I was fifteen. It was the trendy thing to do and I knew that I'd always loved to write, so why one earth not join in? Maybe I'd become an overnight sensation, get discovered and subsequently famous, and then my dreams of being A Writer would come true.

It is now five years later, and I can tell you that this did not happen. Unfortunately.

Essentially, I have put my five years of change on display for the world. The internet has seen me go through falling in love, breaking up, moving out, getting depressed, getting better, getting depressed again, finding my real love, getting married and being An Adult. I have posted things that look like nonsense, things that sound like I talk in sarcasm, things that make my English teachers wonder what I ever saw in myself, and things that have made a few people step back and wonder just what goes on inside this head of blue eyes and brown hair.
For what?

The whole point of blogging is to be who you want, who you are. But I keep attaching rules to it. I can't sound too sophisticated, people will think you're fake. I can't sound too abstract, people will think you're depressed again. I can't talk about life too much, people will find you and do strange things to you.
Apparently I have a propensity to live life by the rules, even though I spend all of my time trying to shirk them. I am a walking contradiction.
I just attribute this to my very strange need to be organized and color-coded (Office Max is my favorite store. I cannot walk in there without buying something. Usually a notebook or a pen...I get this from my mother).

All of this to say, who am I really? And what am I doing here?

For so long, this has been a place of searching, a place of throwing out the messes inside of my head and trying to organize it by it's passing through my fingertips and onto a page. I feel like I still need this, but not as much as I used too. Maybe this is part of what comes with Growing Up--a bigger mental capacity in which to organize Life.
In any case, I still want to be heard. But I want to do it my way, I want people to know me without having to see my face.
And this doesn't just include the deep, inner-workings of my heart. It also includes the mistakes I make for dinner and the uncomfortable outfits that come with freezing Chicago winters.
I'm going to try to be more steady and regular.
I'm going to give my life details, the color inside of the messy lines that come out of pondering.
I'm going to pop out of a page and become real life.
And hopefully, I'll touch just as many people as before. All twelve of you.