I have published 1,696 posts since September 2005.  I’ve written personal posts, sponsored posts, meme posts, question and answer posts, and one post where I was a little drunk.  I’ve blogged about myself, my husband, my kids, my parents, my in-laws, celebrities, politicians, and other bloggers.  Because of this blog, I’ve had opportunities I could not have dreamed of before I started.

But here’s the thing.  Almost every day, I feel like I’m not blogging the right way. Or rather, that my blog has gotten away from me and I don’t know how to get it back.

Every day that I spend online, I find other blogs that look to be way better than this one.  I am constantly questioning whether I’m using the right theme, whether my banner needs updating, and that’s just what’s on the surface.  I feel hopelessly inadequate about my writing all the time.  When I read an outstanding blog post on another blog, I feel like everyone else is just straight up more talented, more funny, more snarky, more insightful, more thought-provoking, and I’m just a monkey banging on a laptop keyboard.

Okay, fine. I don’t really think I’m a monkey. Most of the time.

When I started Table for Five, I blogged about my kids, TV shows, books I was reading, stuff happening in the news. I wasn’t a “brand”, I was just a new blogger trying to figure out how the whole blogging thing worked. The longer my posts got, the more my creative writing training from college kicked in and the more formal my writing got. It was never on purpose, but slowly over the years, I feel like I morphed from “Elizabeth Edwards, Midwestern housewife with three kids battling depression and obesity who can also sometimes be snarky and funny” into “Elizabeth Edwards, owner of a blog that makes her money but causes her stress”.

You wanna know something funny? When I went to the Kraft Foods Delicious Byte Bloggers event in Chicago a few months ago, we were sitting at a table with a marketing lady and she asked us to go around the table and each say something that our readers did not know about us. When it was my turn, I said that very few of my readers knew that in real life, I have one of the foulest mouths imaginable, that I swear like a sailor. Several people at the table reacted in disbelief.

After the round table discussion, Vera Sweeney caught up to me and said “Elizabeth, I just don’t believe it. I do not believe that you swear. Whisper a swear word in my ear.”  So I looked at her and said “goddammit Vera, I swear, okay? I fucking swear.”

See?  My point is that maybe the reason I feel like I’m doing a crappy job is because I’m not writing the way I would speak if I told you the story in person instead of writing it down. Just buy me a drink at BlogHer sometime and ask me to tell you a story and you’ll see what I mean.

I took a break after that last sentence and while checking email, found a new post from Sheena at Sophistishe called Decluttering The Physical And Virtual. I could have written this part of her post myself:

I’m just tired of the seesaw effect I have with this blog. I haven’t posted anything personal, but I have this campaign due. My blog is full of sponsors. Ah who cares business comes first. Business supports family. I’m not trying to be the “perfect” blogger. I don’t want to post this until I give some kind of a life update. Oh forget it, I’ll blog later. Hiding out is much better. Here comes a follow up and another. Ugh, I better get to my obligations. Maybe I’ll have time to write a personal post. I start it… I don’t finish. It sits in drafts. I fail. Repeat.

That is exactly how I feel, almost all the time. It’s so flattering that companies want to work with me, that PR firms have Table for Five on their lists of bloggers they want to work with, it really is. But I feel like I only have so much time and energy to give, and by the time I write the required stuff, I’ve used up all the words that I could have used for a personal post. If that makes sense.

I really have no idea what to do.  Yes, I can work on improving my writing, on remembering to stop and write down my thoughts on stuff,  to save some energy for funny and snarky and oh yes, AMERICAN IDOL RECAPS.  But what I can’t do is change the fact that there will ALWAYS be better blogs than mine. And I may never find that perfect balance between “being real” and well, to be honest, “getting paid”.

If you made it all the way to here, thanks for reading this rather long and rambling post.  Heck, thanks for READING.  It means more than you know that I still have readers after all these years.