I’m doing this for myself- mostly.
It started about a year ago- I found myself questioning my career choice. I was sitting in a session with a client when they said to me, “My daughter is never going to know what real ice cream tastes like. That stuff has too much sugar.” As I was rolling my inner eyeballs, I thought about the immense joy that my own daughter gets when we take her to get a scoop of ice cream. Initially, I wrote it off as a bad work day, which soon became a bad work week, and later a bad work month. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my day job. But I realized that I could not ignore these thoughts any longer without doing something about them. The problem is that it took me another nine months for that part.
The initial idea for a blog came from a stranger. I went into a woodworkers’ shop several months ago and bought a planer (more on that later). As intimidated as I was to be in there buying a piece of machinery that I had about a cumulative of one hour working experience with, I met a very nice woman at the cash register. She had an energy about her and within a couple minutes we were laughing and I could feel my anxiety calming. While we waited for “John” to bring my piece of equipment around she asked me if I blogged. I said that I didn’t. She said I should- that blogging was a thing now and there was a growing niche for women in woodworking who blogged. She eventually ended up meeting me around front to load up my vehicle. She had given up waiting for John saying that she was a better lift truck driver than him anyway. I drove home not really thinking about the blog idea, but more about how happy she was at her job. I wanted to be that happy. I wanted to be around people like that. I wanted to be able to make other people that happy.
I still didn’t make any changes… I met up with a good friend a couple weeks later. I told her what I was thinking about doing and made a commitment to her to start my blog before we got together again. I still didn’t make any changes… Then my husband introduced me to Mel Robbins. I listened to two of her books where she essentially says “Get off your butt, figure out what you are afraid of and 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, GO!”
What do I intend for this blog? I intend to talk about my experience of learning how to be a woodworker or maybe just someone that can makes things from wood. I find it all- the woodworking lingo, the equipment, the instructional videos, the magazine step-by-step guides- very intimidating/confusing. I also find that when I’m out in my garage creating something, I’m very happy. So I’m going to share my ups and downs with figuring this all out. Maybe in a different language that might speak to another person out there who is also a little overwhelmed with getting started. Maybe not. We’ll see.