The Posts That Never Were

It happens to all of us that post online. You start a post, you get interrupted, or you can't think of how to finish it, or a million other things come up and they just sit sadly in the Drafts folder waiting to be finished.

I was reminded of this November writing thing, there's one where you have to write a zillion words in the month (that's a rough estimate, I'm too lazy to Google it), and I just found out you can also just post a blog post a day for the month. Well.. I can't commit to writing a NUMBER of words, but I can commit to writing a post a day. I'm totally counting pictures with commentary in there too, so be warned. In doing so, I logged into my sadly neglected Blog site (it's been 2 years!), and pulled up all the posts I'd ever done, published and not.

And there they were.

I didn't know whether I should just delete them without reading them, knowing the hurt I would feel if I revisited them, or cauterize that wound so I could move on with my life. I chose to read them. The excitement and optimism in them cuts to the bone. They were written years ago, when things weren't great, but they weren't where they are now. They were meant to be companion posts, the one leading to the next. They contain dreams, and a different future, and hope. I haven't felt those for quite awhile until recently, and not for these reasons.

The problem with pre-emptive writing, is that sometimes it can come back to bite you in the butt. You anticipate an event, an outcome, some THING you are excited about, and so in your excitement you write about it, just WAITING for that day all things align and that amazing Something happens and you can be all smuggy smug and hit POST and not even have to try to formulate your thoughts because you've PRETHOUGHT it and it's just there waiting for the world to read. And then.. it doesn't happen. You wait, and you pray, and you try and make it happen, and it just.. doesn't. If you wait long enough, eventually you realize it never will, and you give up. The hope dies. The posts that before were your triumphant Shut The Hell Up And Be Happy to the world now loom over you, twisting in your gut.

And yet..

There's also a sense of Freedom. You can look down the rabbit hole of where life would have taken you had you been able to post those writings, and you realize that you don't have to deal with that future. It's an alternate timeline that just never came into being. You're in THIS timeline. You know how this one has played out. Perhaps that one would have paralleled this one to an extent; it contained the same players, the same things were going on before the paths diverged. Who's to say that would have been better? It definitely could have been worse, more complicated.

And then I decide those posts can go the way of the Dodo. I can delete them, remove them from my past, and move on and look forward. It doesn't matter now what they were about, that's ancient history and ended up being just fiction. What matters now is where I go from here, I think I'm ready for a new future.