I started blogging a few days before my 28th birthday. The two events did not coincide as a symbolic gesture to a new life or anything like that. It was simply that I had the opportunity to do so. i had just given birth a couple of weeks earlier and was on “maternity leave”. If you could call it that. I was a self-employed daycare provider. I couldn’t afford to take much time off. I opted for 3 full weeks not working and then only half enrollment until 6 weeks post-natal. I didn’t have TV so the internet was my diversion between diaper changes and infant naps and during marathon nursing sessions.
Allison Crews was my introduction to blogging, through Live Journal. In all honesty, Allison & I didn’t get along very well with each other. I had nothing but respect, admiration and love for that girl-mom. She reminded me of myself – a teen mom who was doing everything she could to knock the teen mommy stereotypes on their ass , packing a punch so hard they’d never recover the same way. We both were told we were nothing by definition of our age & reproductive status but knew we were something more than anyone wanted to believe . She didn’t relate to me the same way I related to her,though. She thought I was an elitist and classist bitch. Her words. And she didn’t mince ‘em. That was just one of the many things I loved about Allison..and myself.
So that’s how it started, almost exactly 8 years ago.
I’ve tried to walk away from blogging several times over the past 8 years. There are times when blogging feels like nothing but a time vampire. I look at relationships I’ve built over the years through blogging and know that it has not been a waste of time entirely but still…the personal payoff is slim. It seems like all the words I tossed out into the blogoshere might have been better spent on endeavors like…oh…I don’t know…say, those eight or so “works in progress” – novels, non-fiction projects and other things made out of words, that I’ve been working on entirely too long now.
My most recent blog posts here have been media sharing almost exclusively….nothing really substantial. I write things and before I post them, I dissect them and realize they are just small pieces of something more that I’m meant to keep to myself. Then I feel that familiar presence of pressure to blog….like I’m cheating someone out of what I’ve kept to myself. It’s an odd feeling, considering I’ve never felt that it was right to write for anyone other than myself.
I read one day recently in an article entitled, “Ten Tips for Successful Blogging”…# Whatever – Don’t blog about not feeling like blogging or having nothing to blog about. oops.I’m breaking the rules.
I don’t feel like blogging beyond wordless photographic entries – my “memories in the raw” or giving out the link love & media sharing. Someday…maybe it’ll be more again. But for now – that’s the deal. Bite sized blurbs, a snapshot of my life soundtrack & cinematic diversions and link love from around the web. It’s what works for me right now.
[blog title from "True" by Spandau Ballet! Did you hear? They're reuniting! hehe]
