blogger rising

I am so honored to receive this award!

Over at The Rising Blogger, JHS, Esq. of Colloquium has recently taken the reigns as editor where she and her collaborative team are devoted to finding and spotlighting the best of the blogosphere in order to help bloggers find, enjoy, appreciate, and validate the work of other bloggers.

The Rising Blogger Post of the Day Award is bestowed upon original content that is insightful, inspiring, newsworthy, educational, informative, touching, creative, interesting, humorous or . . .

Like I said I am so surprised and honored to receive this award and to be featured. The news came at a great time for me last week when I was really questioning my baring perhaps a little too much of myself. The post selected, Breathing In and Out, was, more or less, a rant that spewed from my mind to my fingertips as I two-finger typed what I was feeling at the moment. I filtered nothing in that post. As the week progressed, I found myself re-thinking that post as well as a few more that followed. I want to be authentic to myself and to those who read this blog…and who might read it in the future. Still I don’t want to hang out too much of my garbage and baggage like my neighbor hangs out her underwear for the neighborhood to see. I reveal perhaps maybe only 5% of what goes on here under the Big Top. Of that 5% I try to share mostly good and funny things. But family life isn’t all perfect wonderful-ness like in the movie Pleasantville. So sometimes you get a glimpse of some of the garbage that can accumulate around this circus.

It’s a fine line we who chose to blog our lives sometimes walk. How true are we to ourselves, our family, our friends and our readers if we only share the warm, melted chocolate chip cookie goodness of our lives with our audience? Is that all they want to see or read about? As I teeter along that line I try to remain authentic by reminding myself what blogs do I read everyday without fail. Are they the Leave It to Beaver, Mayberry RFD type blogs or are they a little more real than that? My style of blogging, which I hope is mostly authentic, is a lot more real than wholesome, perfect life in 20 minutes with frequent commercial interruptions. For me, this award validates my choice to be a little more transparent. Life under the Big Top is a lot of joyful, hopelessly loud, chaotic fun and I certainly could never make up the stuff I do share. But life under the Big Top is sometimes messy too because it is so joyful, hopelessly loud chaotic fun. It’s a freakin’ circus! What else would anyone expect?

So with my acceptance of this award I am asked to pay it forward by nominating a post of another blog whom I feel is worthy of this honor. Keeping with the idea that we readers seek blogs where writers are real I want to nominate a post written by Nurse Sean. Sean is fairly young nurse in his career (compared to my over 18 years as a nurse). In the post A Dark Place, Sean shares his inner and outward struggle as he settles in his new role as a nurse in an intensive care setting. I identified with his dark place as a newer nurse trying to prove to the veteran nurses and docs alike that I had the skills and knowledge base to be there. As a veteran nurse, Sean’s post reminded me my own personal resolve not to be one of those crotchety old nurses who eat the fresh-faced-less-experienced-nurses-just-starting-out for breakfast. I used to be just like them only seeking to fit in, to learn more, to gain more experience and occasionally, be recognized for doing a good job…I still do in my RN-dotage. I imagine in literally any career, vocation or walk of life there are “young ones” like Sean who find themselves in a similar dark place where they are just trying to fit in and do their job well. I would hope that anyone who would read what Sean shares would be able to identify with him, even if they aren’t ICU nurses and perhaps gain a little more grace and acceptance for those around them. It is Nurse Sean’s post A Dark Place that I nominate for consideration for The Rising Blogger’s Post of the Day Award.

Do you have your own “post of the day” you would like to nominate? Would you like to be a part of The Rising Blogger team? Click here and definitely share.