The One I was Afraid to Post

I got nervous because I know that many of my readers aren’t Christians and a good number of them don’t believe in God at all. I worried they would read those admissions, told in the context of the story, view me in an entirely different and unappealing light, and stop reading.

But in the end, I had to publish the post anyway, for one good reason. It was me. It may not have been a very cool or edgy or snarky me, but it was still me, and it was what I had to offer today.

Like most of you out there, I don’t fit neatly into a box marked, “Christian.” Or, “Mother.” Or, “Suburbanite.” Or, “Hipster Parent.” Like most of you, I suspect, I am a mass of contradictions. And I have found during four years of writing that the more honest I am with you about myself, warts and all, the more you respond as readers.

In blogging, it is very tempting to present the selves that we want to be, or worse, that we feel our readers want us to be. This blogger is the picture of domestic contentment. That blogger is the dynamic working woman who manages to balance it all. This one is delightfully quirky and that one lets it all hang out. We end up putting ourselves into neatly-labeled boxes, encouraged to be a certain way by our commenters and our rankings and our marketing relationships and our “brand.” Mommyblogging has become a business, one that, admittedly, I profit from.

But I discovered pretty quickly that I can’t market a false image of myself. I can’t promote myself as a “brand.” The very notion is ridiculous. It feels wrong, particularly when I realize that the thing I’m supposed to be pimping is my life.

And so all I’m trying to do in this sea of promotion and money making and popularity is continue to write authentically. To be me. To admit both my failures and my successes. To write about my faith sometimes, even among the faithless. And to write about my very un-Christianlike thoughts when the mood strikes, even among those who might find them contradictory to my beliefs.

I’m messy. And so my challenge to myself it to keep hitting the publish button, even when I’m afraid to. Because then I’m being true to myself, and that’s infinitely better than trying to be true to an image I feel pressured to give others.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.