Consistency Schmonsistency

I have been lax this week. I didn't update this blog as I've become accustomed to doing on Fridays, and this is not a good sign. Although, a year ago this would have been true to form as I know myself to be extremely inconsistent in most things; until relatively recently.I think this blog is the first thing in a long time that I have dedicated myself to and continued in honour of a promise to, er, myself. But as I said, this week I've been a bit crap. I could say it was because so much has happened this week, or because I was having some writers block, or I was going through my monthly identity crisis.In reality it was probably all of these things, and they all could have been prompts for a blog post, but I was too busy wallowing in my own self involvement to make that step towards productivity. I did eventually get time to consider these things properly though, and then asked myself why old habits just won’t die.I know exactly why I'm inconsistent, and my therapist knows why too, so that's good. If you've read some of my earlier posts, you may or may not have picked up some hints about my less than consistent childhood. I was just recently telling a younger sibling that I've probably moved house about 15 times in my life, and most moves happened before I turned 18. It doesn't really set the precedent for consistency.And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that that kind of situation can leave you feeling baseless and home-less if you're not careful. Needless to say, I was not careful. Of course it's about more than just having one place to live - inconsistent guardians and general emotional danger contributed to the fully formed, slightly shaky but sometimes oddly confident, author writing to you today.My response to all that inconsistency was at first to act in the opposite way - sticking with things or people because I had said I would even though my feelings had dramatically changed about them over time. Then I had a bout of being someone you could never rely on, until finally only I was a casualty of my own inconsistency. And that occurred in my writing until a few years ago. In a previous post, I talk about writing a novel and it was since completing that that I started to understand what sticking with something you love actually felt like. And then the blog began, and the rest as they say, was history (or this website).So why has my inconsistency returned I hear you cry? Well it never fully goes away, but it is precipitated by bouts of groundlessness, and I've got bundles of that at the moment.But I was sad that I missed this week's post, and annoyed at myself for letting it happen. It made me question again what was really important to me - being a part of the rat race and climbing some corporate ladder that leads to a mortgage and normality, or unpredictability that's spurred by creativity and a general happiness in one’s self? It's the second thing by the way, just FYI. Not that any of that was a good enough reason not to update my blog. I think ultimately I am always afraid of caring about something a bit too much, in case it inexplicably goes away, throwing me into chaos and despair. That doesn’t mean I should try to get ahead of it by throwing myself into chaos though, but I haven’t fully learnt that lesson yet; apparently I'm a bit slow on the uptake.

Image credit: bankrupt graph by b farias from the Noun Project