P365 - Day 31 one month in

I’ve been taking daily pictures and writing about them for a month today, so I thought this would be a good time to reflect on my first month of blogging.

It’s been an interesting process for me. At first I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do this, but after a couple of conversations and a randomly drawn card, I knew that this was the right thing for me to do and the right time to do it.

My original plan was just to take a picture each day and write a few sentences about it and that would be it.

But I found out really early on that a lot of the pictures had stories that needed more than a few sentences, and some of them triggered seemingly unrelated memories and thoughts. So my photo of my coffee mug turned into a story about not judging people by what you hear about them, and my photo of my Twitter feed became my thoughts on a lifetime of being told I was shy.

I wondered if anyone would care what I had to say – after all this is just one blog in the hundreds of thousands or even millions that are out there. I’m not a celebrity and I don’t create great art or write great words of inspiration. I’m just a normal working mum, with lots of insecurities, fears, hopes, dreams, highs, lows, good days and bad days.

But despite this, I’m thrilled that I have readers who read my posts and leave me comments – on here, on facebook and on twitter, or sometimes in person. I love that people I don’t even know, or have only met briefly, take the time to reply to what I’ve said.

And I like how different people ‘get’ different things that I write. Some people like scrapbooking, some people like my photos. Some like the mum stuff and some like the gardening. I don’t expect everyone to be interested in every single thing I write and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me either. 

One of the things that I’m grappling with in creating an online presence is how much to actually say, what I want to make public and what I don’t. There are some parts of my life I don’t want to share, and I suppose what I feel comfortable sharing will change as my circumstances change. I also need to take care not to say anything about other people that they might not want ‘out there’.

I also think that if I wouldn’t say (or at some point haven’t said) something in real life then I shouldn’t say it online. Sometimes I might need to make it clear that I’m talking about my own circumstances and that my thoughts on my situation are in no way a judgement on what anyone else does.

I don’t set out to offend or upset anyone. If someone disagrees with me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to apologise for being me and hide my opinions just because someone else might not agree. I just ask that you respect my views, as I will respect yours.

What all that boils down to is that I don’t see the point of writing this blog if I’m not going to be myself.

Having started writing about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling, I now feel less like I’m the only person in the world battling with trying to keep my house organised, or overcoming a fear of meeting new people, or coping with sending my child to school for the first time. And while it doesn’t lessen my own day to day struggles, knowing that there are other people out there dealing with the same things reassures me that I’m not on my own.

So thank you everyone who has read any of my posts and has said something to me about anything I’ve written. I appreciate you taking the time to do that, and it means a lot to me.

And so to the photo:

31 January 2011

This is a digital layout for my Project Life album. It’s based on the Project 365 app on my phone, where you take a photo each day and slot it into the relevant day on the month’s grid.

P365 app screenshot

Obviously this is a January calendar grid, painstakingly created in Photoshop Elements, and each day I’ve simply cropped and resized the photo of the day from the blog, dropped it into the grid and added the date in the corner.

The grid is a 10.5” square and each photo is resized to a 1.3” square. I’ll put a border around it and have it printed as an 11x14” print (once I’ve shopped around for prices).

Then all I’ll have to do is stick it to a 12x12” sheet of cardstock, slot it into a page protector and add it to the Project Life album. On the other side of the page protector I’ll write up a brief description of each photo and a few embellishments to jazz up the page a bit.

And that will be January's photo of the day done. Easy.