A few months ago someone emailed me about the blog, asking me about how I got started and where the ideas from posts come from. She wasn't someone with O.I. and doesn't have a child or even a friend with O.I. - she was just another blogger who was interested in the general blogging process. She said that I make it look easy, that somehow the number of posts I've made and the content that I cover seems vast and never ending. "Is it easy for you?" She'd asked.

No, it's not easy for me. Actually most of the time blogging is either really uncomfortable or really embarrassing for me. While I've been doing this since the spring of 2011 there are many days when I approach a blog post with thoughts of "oy I have to get all touchy-feely again?" Though I have gotten more comfortable with myself, blogging is not "easy" for me per se.

For those of you who have met me in person I tend to be a little more reserved, especially about my personal thoughts and feelings. Being the only one in my family with O.I. and not having met anyone else with O.I. until my second decade, there was no space for me to dump O.I.-related thoughts into except for inside my own head. So while some of you may think that these experiences are not unique to myself alone... for most of my life they were not only personal but they were solitary and private.
I have a close group of friends - they're the ones who I will drop my world of color-coordinated schedules to see. Often those are the same friends who chuckle at the idea of me having such a widely-read and public blog "Really Sandy? You have a blog? It took me only 100 questions to find out who you're dating, what's going on in your life, and the three projects you're working on." (I promise that my friends are really all wonderful and amazing people!) It has been said that there are people who are private, and then there is Sandy.

Being a private person I would much rather talk about things that don't have to do with me - things that are so far away from me that they're across several oceans, time zones, and things that I know maybe .05% about. This way I don't need to put myself out there, this way I can learn and absorb more information than I have to actually dispel. That is my preference when it comes to writing and communicating. It also makes me a humongous nerd who enjoys writing boring non-fiction papers about X, Y, and Z that may hypothetically impact 11% of the population on dot of land in the Pacific. I am not someone who is going to run for public office, I would rather be the someone who advises the public office on what to do and how.

This is why when I began the blog my posts took on a more "Advice-on-living-with-O.I." slant. I advised parents on how to travel with a wheelchair, I advised teens on how to get through high school, I advised classroom aids of students with special needs on what makes a great aide.. And then I quickly realized that I haven't really lived enough to be dispelling so much advice left and right!
But what do I have endless material on? My thoughts. I am a thinker, and probably way too much of one to the extent it can be more harmful than helpful. So I reach into those thoughts, and I practice getting uncomfortable and sharing those thoughts-I'd-rather-not-talk-about with a few hundred people I've never met. See? When I break it down like that you can see why blogging is not easy for me.
For an extremely private, library-book-nerd person yes -- that absolutely does freak me out if I really let myself think about it! Which is why I don't. Instead I think about each post like I'm talking to just one person in my mind. That reader is someone who has, over this year and a half process, helped me to see the value in sharing an aspect of myself no matter how convoluted and wordy it ends up being :-)

Basically this is only easy for me because the reader makes it easy. Thanks.