Well hey there. It's been months since I've written anything here. I kept making excuses for myself, thinking "well life is just busy right now, I don't have time." And that was sort of true. We moved in kind of a rush, were long distance a few days a week for two months while Drew finished out his job in our old town before starting his new one back in our hometown, and my work schedule was changing and becoming more demanding.
But I'm an early riser. Weekends mean sleeping in for Drew if he's off but getting up early and enjoying a morning of quiet for me. Now he works night shifts and I've got a few hours before bed of just being by myself after I've finished my to-do list for the day.
Yes I've had some health problems show up that knocked my energy levels down pretty darn low for a few weeks. But I write naturally, so energy really wasn't an excuse for not writing.
Here's what it really came down to: I was busy comparing myself to everyone else's success and stage of life and didn't feel like I had anything exciting enough to share and couldn't get over the fact that my life didn't look like I thought it should.
I can't promise I'll be a consistent blogger ever again. I live with OCD and sometimes it really does make it hard to not spiral into comparison on probably a deeper level than people with normal brain chemistry.
I can promise I'm not going to have sponsorships again. At least not for a long time. And I won't be doing any ad campaigns for any companies. If I'm going to write at all I'm going to write from the heart.
So many posts in blog world these days are promotional. I see new product reviews, posts promoted by other bloggers because they're obligated to because of sponsorships, and superficial writing constantly because numbers and dollars are taking over the blogiverse. Page views, sponsorships, ad campaigns...at some point it stops being genuine. And it stops being exciting or interesting or heartfelt.
I want to read heartfelt. I want to see the person behind the screen. Is the person behind the screen sometimes really telling their friends about a really great product they just discovered? Absolutely! I do sometimes! But most of my conversations with my friends are about things that happened that we found hilarious or upsetting. They're about what we've been feeling lately. They're about real life.
I don't want to blog if it's just about making a list of how to do this or that or why you should try this new thing I got paid to tell you about. I don't want to share posts that didn't actually make me laugh or inspire me or hit me on a heart level, so why on earth would I ever write those posts?
I also don't want to blog if it becomes a thing that steals my joy because my life doesn't look like yours, and for some reason I think it's supposed to. For a while it did take my joy. It did leave me wondering what was so wrong with me that I couldn't be ready for the same things someone else was ready for. It made me question whether my life was even worth writing about because it wasn't full of so many new or glamorous or attention getting events as someone else's.
So I'm not saying I'm fully back or that I'll have a posting schedule or even that I won't someday choose to quit blogging entirely. That's a real possibility someday, maybe even someday soon.
But once upon a time blogging was fun. It was real. It was enjoyable. It let me write frequently, and I love to write. So I'm semi-returning. When I feel like writing, I'll write. When I feel like sharing, I'll share. But if I feel my joy slipping away in the comparison game or the numbers game or the growth game, I probably will quit. And you know what? That's good. Because anytime something you're doing for fun starts to steal your joy, it's time to leave, at least temporarily.
I'm glad I left for a while. I'm glad I didn't think about numbers. I'm glad I didn't focus on comments or shares or campaigns or anything else I'm seeing take over blogging everywhere.
Time will tell whether or not I decide to quit blogging for real. For now, though, I'm just going to let myself write when I want about what I want, and not worry for a second about what my blog is "supposed" to look like. Or what my life is "supposed" to look like either.
Comparison game, peace out. Ain't nobody got time for that.
