If you’re reading this (and I thank you profusely if you are), there’s a big chance that you too are a blogger.

You don’t have to be, but there’s a good chance you are.

So there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced, and read a million other posts focused on, what I’m about to launch into:

I often feel like a not-good-enough blogger.

Only people without a blog of their own understand what it’s like to be a blogger – and not just a blogger, but one who wants to be read.  It’s exhausting.  The writing, editing, posting.  The reading, commenting, sharing.  The tweeting and Facebooking and insert-name-of-other-social-media-here’ing.

Some may feel that having a blog is simply a matter of writing things down and letting other people read them.  And at its simplest, that’s exactly the case.  But nothing in life is really that simple, is it?

Blogging is, in fact, a slice of life.  Just like there’s internal pressure to live up to other women, be they colleagues or neighbors or that pesky in-law who does everything just a little bit better than you, there’s pressure to live up to other bloggers as well.

I think it’s human nature to create pressure for ourselves whenever at least one other person is introduced into the equation.

So I feel the pressure to live up to other bloggers.  The ones who post daily.  The ones who are on social media all the time.  Who are constantly being mentioned by other bloggers, who have tons of followers, who create to sort of work which compels people to leave comments.

How do I get there? I ask myself constantly when I start feeling less-than.  What am I not doing? Where is that last puzzle piece? Where do I go to get the exposure I need? How do I learn to live with less sleep (because there’s no way these people are getting 7 hours)?

Who knows if there’s an answer to any of those questions.

The important question is: How do I make blogging fit into my life?

My life is not blogging.  Blogging is merely a part of it.  The life I desire, the one I see just over below the horizon, is a rich one.  It’s full of all sorts of things, the things I hold dearest: Love and beauty, family and friends, discovering and learning everything there is to know about everything that interests me.

That is not the sort of life spent entirely behind a computer screen.

So while blogging has afforded me the opportunity to meet people I adore and to become a part of movements like Just Be Enough, there are times when I need to give myself a reality check and remember that a life spent chasing elusive “success” is a life during which a lot of other things are missed.

So I post regularly, but not daily.  I try to return every comment and repay visits, but sometimes I just don’t cover everyone.  I want to visit all my friends and keep up with their blogs but I can’t always catch every post.  And Twitter? Well, I spend time on there when I can.  But not as much as I used to.

I happen to also enjoy sleeping, spending time with my husband, having clean clothes to wear to work.  Bathing.  You know, the things which may otherwise be forgotten in the face of a blogging obsession.  I’m looking forward to planting mums again this year and, of course, there’s the holidays to look forward to.  All of these things take time.  But I don’t want to give any of it up.

I’m doing the best I can do.

The best I can do just has to be enough.

 This is the last week of our Be Enough Me for Cancer campaign! For every 20 linked up posts,Bellflower Books will provide a memory book to a woman fighting breast cancer through Crickett’s Answer for Cancer, and help bring a smile to courageous women giving it their all, every single day. The link up remains open for three days. No blog? No worries. You can also comment on the post or on the Just.Be.Enough. Facebook page with your own story and be counted.