June Challenge: Day 13

Day 13 – Blog Challenges



This topic can mean different things depending on how you wish to interpret it. I mean, you can talk about this particular challenge or others you have seen or participated in or you can look at the challenges to blogging. Since this is my first challenge, I am going to discuss the challenges to blogging.


I started this blog to discuss my Sisterlock journey. I wanted to give those considering locking to get an honest look at the good, bad and indifferent of Sisterlocks. Initially, it was fun and because so many other SL’ers were blogging as well, it gave us a tight community to depend on and honestly folks who understood the intricacies of having and maintaining Sisterlocks. As my hair grew, the focus of this blog started to change and grow as well. So last year, I think, I changed my title and tweaked it a bit to discuss life with a few moments of hair talk. Because face it, many of you who started reading my blog came here for the Sisterlock information. So I try to keep the pictures coming and give a few antidotes of life with Sisterlocks. But as I have said over and over, I am so over my hair.


I have been journaling since I was a tween. My mother gave me my first diary with the key lock. I wrote in that thing faithfully because I thought it was safe to say whatever I was feeling. However, I learned it was the place my mother would go to discover what the heck was going on with me. I found it to be an invasion of my privacy, like I had rights as an early teenager. So I started to just write hateful things in it hurt my mother’s feelings. And since my sister is a middle child, she took great pleasure in telling me every time my mother read my journal. Eventually I stopped. Then I went on to writing profanity laces letters to God about the way I was being treated by my mother. Oh yeah, I was your typical teenager, but that is another blog post altogether.


Well, in high school I would write in a spiral notebook my thoughts and feelings. Then again I stopped writing and not because anyone was reading it, but I was enjoying my partying days. However, in 2005 my aunt got sick and I needed an outlet for my stress, because it was manifesting itself in major hive breakouts. Really. It helped me to keep a prospective on life and keep up with my aunts medical changes as well. Those journals came in handy for specific dates.


Writing in my journals is therapeutic. I have consistently written in them since 2005. I missed a few days during the deaths of my aunt and uncle and my own hospitalization this year, but I write as much as I read because it is a part of me as breathing. Blogging is just an extension of this need to express myself. Of course, this blog is not anonymous so I have the added challenge of being as honest as I can be, to an extent. I have some boundaries on what I will discuss. I do not discuss The Guy in detail or our relationship as a given. I do not expose all the family drama on here either. I have an anonymous blog for just that where no one knows me and I can write about politics, drama, love, sensuality and anything I want because no one knows me and I do not have to censor myself. I like that. And most of my followers on that blog aren’t even African-American go figure…