The scariest thing about blogging

   Bloggers and writers the world over may have different answers to this question (And I believe that this applies to writers too). But in my opinion it’s ‘Baring your thoughts and opinions to this bevy of people who can either like it or hate it’. And trust me, people can be very critical!! Just look at any random movie review and you’ll see what I mean. For example some of you may have watched ‘The Avengers’ or ‘The Dark knight rises’ and thought that they were the best movies made this year (Yes, I confess that those are my favourite 2012 movies so far.... :-) ) but somewhere..out there..... there’ll be someone who thinks that they are total crap!

   

  Hence the reason why I don’t rely on book, movie or music critics so that I can judge whether something is worth my time/money. I like to form my own opinions because in the 2 decades I’ve spent on this planet I’ve learnt that criticism is simply opinion. And opinion can be heavily biased based on an individual’s past experiences hence it is highly unreliable at times. For the same reason while in school I tried not write-off anyone as ‘mean’, ‘stuck-up’ etc just because those were the labels people put on them. I actually took time to get to know them and then I’d have an accurate idea of who they were.

   But back to the title of this post. The scariest thing about blogging is giving people carte-blanche to say whether or not they like you and your writing. And I suppose that on some subconscious level everybody would like to be liked. Human beings are social creatures and I think it’s a bit obvious that we don’t always do well in isolation. So if you are a writer/blogger and you want people to like your work it’s so tempting to change yourself and write what you know they’d like and not necessarily what you believe in.

  

  I find that extremely FAKE!!! You’re lying to them and most importantly to yourself. And that’s just sad! When I started this blog I promised myself that everything I’d write would always be 100% authentically me. Hence the title ‘Random thoughts of a girl in Nairobi’. I don’t believe in bending-over backwards to please people. It takes way too much time and effort that I’d rather spend doing other things (baking, reading, sleeping...lol!). Because trust me, no matter how you present yourself, there’ll always be people who don’t like it and who think you’d be better off if you changed a couple of things. So I think that one of the easiest ways to be happy in life is to be so comfortable in your own skin that it doesn’t matter what other people say! The only opinion that really matters is God’s and your own. If you have to change something let it be because either He (God) is not happy with it or you’re not happy with it.

Ciao......