Themes.

See, the problem with all of this meditation and learning business is that it causes you to think about stuff. A lot.

Here's the sitch: There's about 3 lady bloggers right now of whom I regularly devour their stuff. I know this isn't going to come out the right way no matter how much I edit it, so I'll just say it: I love them because something about them resonates with me. They're just kickass. Funny. Brash. Smart. Driven.

What sets us apart, though, is that they've found a way to leverage their voice into out-and-out worldwide domination. And they've done this by pinpointing something they're passionate about and then writing about it. All the time. And reading them, I've started to feel rebuked, in a way. "I could do that," I find myself thinking, my eyes lingering over all the cool stuff they have going on. I just haven't really tried.

I haven't. I love this blog and everything that it's been to me. But I haven't really tried that hard to figure out what it is exactly that I want to say. And in fact, I've pretty much willfully gone against that idea when it comes to this blogging home of mine.

Sometimes I've wondered if that was a mistake. When, for business purposes, I kept reading articles about the importance of having a theme and being known for something when it comes to blogging, it slowly started to seep into my subconscious. The result? Here's the blogging trajectory of this year: Start a bunch of blogs that each deal with a different angle of my life. There were some great things that came out of it - e.g., being able to post audio on my Tumblr directly resulted in more serious writing this year than I've done in a long, long time - but when it came down to it, I kind of hated it. Take the above example again - yes, I posted more serious writing this year than I have in a long time...but unless you guys were all proactive about adding that Tumblr to your feed or following it with your own Tumblr account, I didn't get to share it with you. And I hate that. I want everything in one place. Easy. Accessible. I want it home.

But because I'm hopelessly neurotic, I also worry that if I put that stuff all in one place, it's just going to become a big ol' mess. I never worried about that before - I still belong to the school of thought where tools are awesome, but quit fucking trying so hard... just fucking write something good, that you like...and if you like it, chances are others will, too, and then you can shut up about it - but I like definition. I like my organized boxes.

But life is changing. I love this blog as a place where I can write about nothing and everything. It doesn't have to mean anything, it doesn't have to help you, it doesn't have to have a theme. But more and more, I also feel like there's more I want to say. I want to talk about writing and relationships and inner-growth and things I find fascinating and inspiring and motivating, like sustainable development and yes, social media (the cool as shit stuff about social media) and taking risks with your life and getting out there and fucking doing something. And even though there's a part of the internet these days that keeps saying, "No, it needs to be under a theme...if you're going to write about that stuff, then you need to make the entire blog about it so people don't get confused", I can't buy into that. We're not 5 yr olds. We shouldn't melt down just because a blogger has the audacity to write about something different for once (or writes about a whole number of different things under the same umbrella). I don't get upset when my friend Erica wants to talk about bikes instead of boys. Why are we expecting our bloggers to be these writer-ly cubbyholes (I put my social media stuff in this one, and in this one I'll find my stuff about the environment...)? It's bullshit. And it's boring.

And yes, you just read through my blog's identity crisis. And the result is this: Let's just agree that this is the place where we talk about cool shit. That's our theme...The Blog of Really Cool Shit.

I might work it out a little bit more with the title and everything, but you get it.