Does Haste Really Make Waste? (The Anatomy of a Rusher.)

I have a confession, if you don't already know: I have a tendency to rush through creative time.  I’ve blogged about the whole journey vs. destiny thing before, but because it’s something I continually struggle with, I am compelled to write about it again. It’s not a New Year’s resolution to work on rushing less (more of a lifetime personal goal to work on), because as you know I am not a big believer in setting these kinds of January resolutions, and instead aim for more realistic ones; however, I think my rushing gets the best of me sometimes, and the worst of me, I suppose (but that’s for another day and time).

My rushing is particularly evident when I’m blogging, which for me is my creative time, my soul time. I write fast and swift because I want to get it all out there before I lose my train of thought or run out of the limited time and energy I have for such precious pursuits. While I am a perfectionist in many ways, in this situation my rushing takes precedence over my perfection. The mantra I tell myself is: if I have to choose between Consistency (albeit with flaws) or Inconsistency (with perfection), I’ll take the Consistency because otherwise the writing might not happen as regularly, or at all, even. 

But sometimes when I go back and read my blogs there are spelling errors and punctuation blunders. And, in many cases, I find my blog entries to be harried sounding and rushed. In my constant attainment of both consistency and perfection, this bothers me, because my blog entries wind up not being representative of my best writing, and as someone who has two degrees in English, my writing is something I have a bit of pride about.  In that sense, I feel like I'm shortchanging myself.

But then when I reflect more on it, I realize that it's an okay thing if not every blog entry is a masterpiece.  After all, isn't the original definition of a blog to be a "web-based log," a journal of sorts? More importantly, if I had to choose (and sometimes in life we do have to choose), I’d rather have some kind of voice (even if it's a sometimes inarticulate, fast-talking one at times) as opposed to no voice at all. 

We all have a voice, and we need to be able to use it.