Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been doing my best to be a pos­i­tive per­son in my writ­ing for this blog since I restarted it last week.  Those of you who know me per­son­ally know that I can be quite cyn­i­cal and pes­simistic, but this is some­thing about myself that I’ve been try­ing to change.  It’s not that I think there’s any­thing wrong with being cyn­i­cal, but hon­estly, I’ve got­ten really tired of it.  Maintaining all that cyn­i­cism can take effort.  So with this blog, and with other aspects of my life, I’ve tried to focus on the good side of things.

When I write encour­ag­ing blog posts like I have lately, the audi­ence is myself as much as it is you.  When I tell you that per­se­ver­ance pays off or that your work is worth cel­e­brat­ing just for exist­ing, I’m writ­ing to con­vince myself of that just as much as any­one else.

Twitter response has been great to such posts, and I tweeted not long ago that it seemed like at any given time, there’s some­one out there who could use your words of encour­age­ment.  It was a real­iza­tion that shocked me.  In my own self-​​centeredness, I’ve spent more time think­ing about how I could cheer myself up, than how I could cheer oth­ers up.  And so now, when I write encour­ag­ing words, I try to think about that per­son out there, the anony­mous reader, who needs it even more than I do. 

Something’s work­ing.  For one, I finally fin­ished a story this week that I’ve been ham­mer­ing away on for the month of September.  For another, I had a look at the traf­fic and feed sub­scriber num­bers for this blog, and in the past two weeks, my audi­ence size has dou­bled.  I have to con­clude from that that you like what I have to say lately, and I should keep at it.  And I will, I think.  What started as a forced exer­cise is more and more becom­ing who I am now.

It’s strange to real­ize how much we change by acci­dent, through sheer chance.  When you set out a plan and go after it and work hard to make some basic change, and it works—that I under­stand.  But when it hap­pens on its own, as a byprod­uct of some­thing else… it’s sur­pris­ing, in a delight­ful way.

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Tags: lesson learned, My Writing, positivity