GUEST BLOGGER: Erin Erickson of The Erin Experiment

In my 34 years on this planet, there are two things that I’ve learned about myself that I think might be helpful for understanding me and my blog:

* There is a special gravity that pulls me to the written word. It’s why I was a journalism major in college and why I find blogging so cathartic.
* I like to live outloud.

What exactly is ‘living outloud’ you may ask? To me it means processing whatever is going on in my head through the written word. From diaries and journals as a kid to blog posts and Facebook updates as an adult, if it’s in my head and it’s not pornographic or horribly mean, then I’m likely to post it.

For me, publicly declaring my thoughts helps me process them. I’ve learned throughout my life that I don’t like to keep my emotions bottled up inside. Ask anyone really close to me what happens if I do that — I explode into a fury of rage.

And so I write.

When I first started this blog, I wrote on it like it was an online diary. I often forgot other people read it and so I filled my posts with anger, sadness, grief and frustration. Once I started writing about being a stepmom, I noticed that other stepmoms would tell me that they didn’t feel as alone anymore. That my authentic writing helped them feel like they had a friend.

Other stepmoms… didn’t feel as alone anymore.

When biology didn’t afford me my own children, I used technology to create something similar to them. Thanks to Ning, Wordpress and Blogger, I’ve watched sites like Stepchicks and the Stepfamily Letter Project grow into these amazing beings that I’m extremely proud of.

As my sites evolved, so did my life. I went from one extreme of stepmotherhood to another. Every time I thought I’d found solid ground, I was swept back out into chaos. No matter how desperate I was to find my footing, I continued to write, because that’s what I do. I needed to live outloud in order to process my feelings and emotions.

And then I fell victim, not once but several times, to one of the top 10 things you don’t want happening in social mediadom: I was heard.

My living outloud didn’t sit well with some people.

No one had a problem with Erin, the strong, nice, sweet, helpful, friendly woman/friend/family member. It was when I started talking about my feelings that people started to take offense.

I remember writing a Facebook post about being sad about my grandmother. Her nurse was sure she’d die within a few weeks and being the owner of my emotions, I publicly mourned for the future loss in a status update. I’ve since found out that relatives have alerted other relatives who have instructed my mom to tell me to take the update down or to not post things like that.

Almost near the same time, I also found out my stepkids’ mom found and read my blog. She wasn’t happy, to say the least, and was offended by my posts. Life as I’d known it suddenly changed again and I was on the defensive for approximately 36 hours as I tried to figure out what to do.

As someone who lives outloud, my blog was, and is, my space to process my emotions. Both of these instances have shown me that some people aren’t quite the living outloud realists I am and that they feel I should cater to their needs instead of my own.

Here’s the thing: I don’t, nor will not ever, apologize for my feelings or emotions. They are mine and I own them.

I’ve never claimed to be perfect. I am a living, breathing human being with a lot of feelings. I am also a stepmom who can’t quite figure out her place in her blended family and who also has a husband that travels 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. My nearest family members are 30 miles away and I do not have friends in the town we live in.

And so I write. And I live outloud.

I write to reach out to other women like me. I write to, as strange as it sounds, reach out to myself.

I could have told the people who don’t like my blog or Facebook content to piss off, but that’s not the kind of person I am. The kind of person I am accepts that people will do what feels comfortable for them whether that be publicly acknowledge reality and the feelings that go along with it or not.

And so I will continue to live outloud.

I will continue to write about my life although, like any good little journalist with a personal blog, I am also going to try to write more posts about Stepmom issues in general — not just my own.

I will adopt a blog statement that I will proudly display on my slightly redesigned homepage. That blog statement being that I’m a stepmom who writes about stepmom issues in order to help other stepmoms feel less alone.

I will ask that if anyone is offended by my blog posts or Facebook updates that they take it up with me through e-mail or phone rather than through gossip mill. If you’re going to take offense at my feelings, at least have the decency to ask me about them. Nothing will worsen my mood than being the subject of pisstivity and not being given the chance to explain things.

I will not back down and I will not change my feelings or my realist outlook because others don’t like it.

It’s not who I am.

Erin writes at The Erin Experiment and is the founder of Stepchicks

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