I started this blog in when I was 19. I had no clue what I was doing. I hardly knew how to use the computer. We hadn’t had one when I was growing up. I really didn’t even know what a blog was suppose to be. Back then, there weren’t any rules posted anywhere about how to blog, or what to blog about. You just started writing.
I’d written on a place called LiveJournal for a year. I would continue to write on LiveJournal, but this space? It was where I eventually began to write for the love of writing, and not for anything or anyone else.
I made connections. I read blogs of others who lived lives as similar and dissimilar to mine as you could get. I made heart friends. We laughed over funny things that happened during our weeks. We squealed about new rings and weddings and babies. We just wrote ordinary words. That’s all. Just ordinary words about ordinary days.
I blogged because I wanted to. Now, I blog because I think I have to.
Somewhere in the last ten years, I got caught up in the technicalities and the formalities and the dos and the don’ts of blogging. Some of it was good stuff. But a lot of it dragged me down. I struggled to write like I use to. I felt like hiding out in a corner and the never ending list of stuff I “had to do” to be a real blogger overwhelmed me. Sometimes I wondered why I even kept up. It was that love affair with writing that kept me coming back. I had to write.
With the entering of a new season in our lives, I’ve been taking stock of a lot of things I’ve done, did or do. I’ve carved out things that simply don’t matter, held on tighter to things that did. I’ve let go of some dreams, and felt others I thought were long gone revive again. But I couldn’t let go of blogging and I couldn’t enjoy it.
Then someone came out and said it. They said what I couldn’t figure out how to say. It smacked me right between the eyes. It hit me hard enough that the flickering light bulb that just couldn’t quite get going burst into full light. I knew exactly where the joy had gone from my blogging experience. I knew exactly why what I wrote felt dry sometimes. I knew exactly what was missing and what I wanted out of this blog. I wanted to go back to the simple days of simple stories. I wanted to just write again.
But they said it all so much better than I could have put into words. And I knew this was what I wanted to do.
I wanted to write about growing our baby girl. I wanted to write about how pregnancy wasn’t anything like I expected. I wanted to write about how the farmer’s market made me dream again, and how there’s a lizard that lives under our door.
I work with bloggers and small business owners as a Virtual Assistant. I see a lot of business and a lot of good content. I love my job. But when I read blogs, I miss the old, simple posts of a different blogging era. Just simple, ordinary things that made me feel connected.
Maybe you don’t blog for the same reasons that I started. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with blogging for something other than the stories.
But if maybe, just maybe, you’re feeling burnt out and confused about what happened to the joy you got out of blogging back in the day, this could be your light bulb revival moment too.
I don’t really know exactly what the light bulb moment means. But I’m hopeful that it will lead to all good things. I want to write again.
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