Saffinity: A world of odds and sods

Where do I slot in?

In the big wide world of blogging, there are a lot of classifications.

You can be a sewing blog, a knitting blog, a life blog, a religious blog, a review blog, a challenge blog, a mommy blog, a health blog…. the list goes on and on.

I’ve recently been trying to think about what I would call my blog.

When I started blogging it was back in 2004 on blogspot, and I was bound and determined to become the next Yarn Harlot. She knit, she took pictures, she was funny, and she was popular.

I was sure I’d find people who were similar to me, who had the same likes, the same ideas, and, most importantly, would be my friends and make me feel good about myself…. ok, so I have a few self confidence issues.

I tried, I really did, I just didn’t knit pretty stuff, and I wasn’t funny, and I was trying to be someone people would like, and who wasn’t me. So over time, I decided to stop blogging, or rather, just didn’t find the time. My blog lazed about, and I eventually moved it over to BlogDrive, which seemed like a better site. It had prettier templates at least.

After a few stuttering failures at becoming a famous blogger again, I slowed right down. I tried to make my blog also focus on my costumes, as I went back and forth between hobbies, and just couldn’t seem to pick up speed, or readers for that matter.

I eventually moved my entire blog over here to WordPress, and I like it here… that’s not so say I won’t find another place that I enjoy blogging at more, but for now, this is my blog home. Plus I don’t want to have to take 4 months to move all the posts over from this blog.

Since I’ve been here at WordPress, I’ve tried to join challenges, I’ve posted recipes, I’ve shown my costumes, talked about my body issues, review some plays I went to, talked about my religion and my thoughts… and this year, I’ve started sewing my own clothes.

The problem with these blog classifications is that while many people will only write about a certain topic on their blogs, it doesn’t even begin to cover the variety of things that they do and think in their lives.

There’s a reason that I dubbed this blog “Odds and Sods”. I’m a bundle of them, my house is a bundle of them, my life is a bundle of them. I realized recently that when looking and talking to me you can’t slot me into a catagory. Going over in my head all the things that classify me, this is just a short list of the things that came to mind:

Geek
Christian
Friend
Sewer
Knitter
Costume Maker
Cat Lover
Gamer
Dancer
Weirdo
Drama Nerd
Theater Lover(yes they’re different)
Food Critic
Administrator
Writer
Wife
Daughter
Sister
Chef
Baker
Artist
Collector

And I could probably think of 20 more things that could classify me. If I fit into all these things, and I write about the majority of them on my blog, does that put me at odds with the pretty little classification system that the Internet has so wonderfully created? Does this leave me on the sidelines as an oddity that doesn’t work into the system and should therefore be ignored?

I don’t know.

I know I have a few more readers than I did when I started, though the majority of them are friends, coworkers, people I know in real life. It would be nice to have a blog where converstions are held in the comments. I just don’t think I’ll ever write that kind of blog. The nice thing is though, that I can go to those kinds of blogs and participate in the conversation in other comment sections.

I’ve also come to terms that I don’t need to make myself be something else to get more people to like me, which is why I’ve stopped trying to be funny, trying to be interesting and trying to be popular. This blog isn’t for me to get friends, it’s for me to write for me. It’s a place where I can put my thoughts and come back to them in the future.

Right now, I don’t really want to go back to the 2004 posts and see what I wrote, because I know that wasn’t who I really was. That was the insecurities of a 22 year old screaming “SOMEONE LOVE ME!!!!!” and I can’t really compare that to who I am other than to know that what I write now IS me.

There’s no point in trying to impress others by being someone I’m not, eventually the truth will come out.

So rather than being fake… I… just ease into my weirdness. At work I didn’t show all my geekitude and costumes and such for the first few months. Now I have a group of coworkers who ask if anything I’m wearing is handmade, another group that’s coming to a geek gamer party we’re having in February… I just didn’t exactly make my geek hood known right away.

This is my blog… It may not ever be on any lists of favourite blogs, it may not every even be read by more than 5 people in a day, but it’s my little spot to put my thoughts, put my pictures, and have something to come back to and see how my life was at this time. If I get more readers, great, but that’s not why I’m writing.

Not anymore.