I have wanted to have a blog since probably high school. Ever since I first learned what blogging was, I thought, “Hey, that could be something I would enjoy!” I’ve always loved writing, from the free-writing time we used to get a block of in elementary school, to typing out the longest novel of a text you’d ever want to read, to trying to add some engaging voice to work emails. (Although I guess I should add the qualification that I love writing for myself – not so much for the school papers that were required reports which I always put off until the night before they were due.)
Speaking of procrastination, you might now be thinking, “So Danielle, if you’ve wanted to blog since high school, why don’t you have a regular blogging habit going by now?” To answer that, let me first point you in the direction of one of my all-time favorite TED Talks –
It’s always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past. — Tim Urban
It’s always been a dream of mine to have a blog already established and a great online journal to look back on… however, I struggle incredibly with the process of actually starting one.
In high school I discovered Xanga blogs, and began reading others’ even though I never started one of my own. In college, I kept up with a Tumblr blog following the picture-a-day concept for several months actually, however, I fell off that wagon when I began just re-blogging other “Fitblr” blogs’ diet and exercise tips that I was never actually going to use and it started feeling like an inauthentic representation of me. And lastly in my adult life, I’ve started and stopped 3+ different WordPress blogs and another attempt at a Tumblr for various reasons after varying degrees of commitment or lack thereof.
Most recently, I had announced last fall that I would be completing the “Danielle con Queso Project,” cooking my way through Lisa Fain’s Queso cookbook just like Julie & Julia. Welp, we all saw how long that lasted, and I’m going to take a stab at why that may have been.
Blogging about making queso wasn’t just blogging – it was shopping for ingredients, making time to stop to take pictures throughout the cooking process, forgetting to get enough pictures to show the progression of steps, feeling self-conscious about my food photography ability in the pictures I did take, thinking that oh hey I should also have a “Queso Quotient” as a way to rate all the quesos against each other with categories of essential qualities of queso… Basically, give me anything to overthink and I WILL overthink the heck out of it!
So, for now, I’m just going to write, about whatever and wherever my own personal wind blows my writing. At the very least, it’ll be practice for eventually writing my own book and fulfilling a long-time dream of mine to become a published author one day.
Speaking of wind, why aren’t you blogging as “Tumbleweeds in the Wind”, Danielle?
Some of you may know that Reid and I have an Instagram and Facebook page (and soon to come YouTube channel) for our RV travels under the username Tumbleweeds in the Wind.
Quick side note, we picked that name because it’s one of my favorite lines of Jack’s from Titanic, which I was re-watching for about the 60th time this spring, and thought, “Hey, that’s actually kinda how Reid and I live our lives.” We’re both extremely go-with-the-flow and fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants type of planners, and the way the whole RV idea came to fruition was basically just us allowing ourselves to get fully caught up in our own wind of taking action to make it happen, and it all happened so fast. And now, our travel style is pretty much the same, as in, we’ll be in a city and say to each other, “We should probably figure out where we’re heading tomorrow…”
Anyways, Reid has no desire to write a blog, so if we did a Tumbleweeds blog it would be all me. Which would be fine, but, since I’ve also wanted to have a blog for reasons outside of the RV travels and don’t want to limit what I post to stick within what people just following for RV stuff would most likely be interested in reading, I wanted to just make my own blog and own name separate from Tumbleweeds. However, I’ll definitely be sharing stories of our travels from my point of view on here, and linking to our shared social media whenever relevant!
