really should start speaking again. where's my voice at?

It started with a Facebook link to someone's year in status - a collage of her 2010 status updates: some interesting and cryptic, some delightfully self-absorbed, some just hilarious but only if you knew she wasn't joking. I thought of trying it but I'm a little anti-FBapps. Still, if I look back on the year I am annoyed with this abbreviation of my own thoughts. Status updates are fun like haiku is fun, but so limited. Where did my voice go? Most of my statuses were my self-conscious attempts to express by way of omission.

I know why I abandoned the whole inner dialog and moved all my stuff to ~140 characters. When I realized blogging about work could put my job at risk, I censored myself. It left me with little more to say than the most sarcastic sentiments that fit neatly in a couple of occasional lines on FB or Twitter. I still feel the same about not work-blogging, especially after replying to a friend who tweeted #worksucks.

I could post a few words instead about Kina Grannis, and I probably will later. Ok, I will now. It's just that I was knocked out by her ability to reply to 160+ comments on a link she posted a couple hours ago. I feel like I could only fail if I tried to describe why and how much this impresses me. Yet how rare is it that you witness someone take the time to hold a hand out to a few hundred strangers and make them friends? How often do we dismiss it as an impossible disposition to adopt with any honesty?

The point? It was a prompt to hold up a mirror and ask myself if I like who I am. I can say that I do, but I don't say it. I waste my words on what I don't like about myself or what I do or for whom I do it.

So... if I can get a little head start on my 2011 goal, today I make an effort. I want to have a little heart, or a bigger heart, and share it. My tendency toward introversion should provide some challenge, or at least maintain realism in my goal. I don't intend to make every stranger I encounter a friend, but I do intend to make my family, my friends to know how dearly I value them. Perhaps this year my circle will grow, not superficially but to the depth that makes it worthwhile. So there you go, a message from my heart. I'll listen to it, see what it makes me do and let you all know how it turns out.