The plague of praise.

Even as a child I had the urge to write. My mum still has pieces of paper with my name scribbled across them from when I was a kid and begging her to let me play with pens. In school I always enjoyed creative writing the most so this influenced my decision to take English language in college. Unfortunately the course wasn't what I expected and I spent more time analysing the scrawlings of three year olds than I did actually writing. Outside of the education world I tried to keep up with my writing. I've attempted numerous times to start a diary yet they always seem to turn out the same, three entries in a row and then a six month gap before anything else. I've written a few articles too but nothing huge. The idea of a blog seemed ideal. It could be a combination of a diary and a collection of articles. I didn't want to create a blog with a particular theme because being restricted to only write about one thing makes me not want to write at all.

It was around January this year that I decided to start a blog... Yes, it has taken me THIS long to actually start it. My initial fear was that no one would read what I wrote and that my blog would be a pointless waste of the internet, much like my twitter account which I now only use to snoop on minor celebrities. The feeling that no matter what you do in life, there's always someone better made me put this off for a few months. Why would anyone want to read what I'd rambled about when there was probably someone better writing about the exact same thing in a far more captivating way. When I thought about this more I realised that I wasn't actually afraid of having an unpopular blog, I was more afraid of having a popular one.

Since I started school my life has been plagued by praise. In year 2 I came second in a competition to design a new school logo which everyone had been forced to partake in. It got announced in assembly and everyone clapped. When I was a little bit older I wrote a letter to a beanie baby magazine which got published, thanks to my parents my teacher found out and told my class. Then everyone clapped. Later on in school life during assembly one Friday morning I got a certificate for being the pupil of the week, an accolade I'd desperately been trying to avoid for my entire educational life. I had to walk to the front to collect it then prolong the agony by standing there for the remainder of the assembly. Yet again, everyone clapped. Every single time I heard that clatter of skin slapping against skin I wanted to be swallowed up by the world and become invisible. I hated it. For me, praise has always been hard to deal with. Whenever it happens I immediately dismiss whatever I've done as being 'nothing' or I force people to put the credit on someone else. However, no matter how many times I have tried, I've never been able to escape the torture that is praise induced clapping. The most recent incident occurred at my boyfriend's house when playing Cranium with his family after I managed to spell 'pistachio' backwards. I was quite sure my eardrums burst from the sound of digits and palms crashing together.

My problem with praise made me fear that by some twisted turn of events my blog could actually become popular. The idea of people reading my rants and enjoying them made me panic, yet another reason I put this off for so long. After thinking long and hard about it and discussing it with other people I came to the conclusion that I should get over this silly fear of someone liking what I've done and write this thing. It will finally mean I'm not afraid of people reading my writing and perhaps make my fantasy of becoming a journalist that little bit more accessible. I'm not intending for this blog to be big and I don't want to write purely in the hope that one day I'll get noticed and some independent company will send me hoards of products to try out praying I'll give them a glistening review, I'm writing this blog for me. Sort of somewhere I can store my thoughts and a way I can keep developing my writing. If no one reads it, I have an archive of things to look back on. If it gets praise, I'll have to deal with it. At least it won't be audible.