And then it was December. Practically the end of December, in fact. The end of the whole year. That was fast.
I was a few words away from finishing when I realized that, without my noticing it, this thought I’d been drawing out for a little bit had become something I was going to post on my blog.
I haven’t been a blogger for a minute, I thought to myself. I remembered all the times we (the Ur-Bloggers, if you will) wrote the obligatory post about not posting. It was easy to fall off the radar in those days, and staying engaged with people who read whatever we wrote was important. After 20+ years, though, I don’t really feel that urgency.
Back in those days, there were two kinds of bloggers: those who wrote all their posts offline, and those who hadn’t had an entire post eaten by a Netscape crash, yet.
Guess which kind I was when I went to publish my shiny new post?
I can laugh about it now. But at the time, I was really bummed out. I’d put together good thoughts about boundaries and reclaiming something I loved that had been taken from me and perverted into something to hurt me. I had some nice turns of phrase, a good conversational tone that made me feel like I was really doing this writing thing, you know?
This year has been something else, man. I don’t have the stamina at the moment to do a wrap up (for one thing, my arm is killing me from patting myself on the back), but until I do… the first half of this year was all about publishing and promoting and supporting Still Just A Geek.
The second half of this year has been focused almost entirely on self care, therapy, healing, and recovery from all the trauma that the first half stirred up. Lots of therapy every week, lots of homework every night, lots and lots of private writing that I’ll never share with anyone. It’s helping tremendously. I’m healing a lot, but discovering that many wounds go deeper than I knew, or imagined. So there’s a lot of work to do and I’m centering myself and my family while I do it.
I’ve been posting short things on Facebook and Tumblr, and I haven’t missed old school blogging at all, until today. I miss the quick little posts that we’d do before we all moved to Twitter. I miss the lists of links and things that we did before newsletters replaced those posts. I miss the low stakes, when it felt like nobody was watching.
…okay, that’s not exactly true, now that I read it. The stakes were INCREDIBLY high for me back in the day and it was INCREDIBLY important to me that people were watching. But there were long stretches of time when it was just fun. Posts that were just about silly things like pictures of Gary Coleman and KITT, imagined scripts of Robocop as a sitcom, the joy of discovering my voice and where I fit in with other writers. Occasionally starting or participating in a conversation that had positive, meaningful, real consequences in the world. And, of course, a general absence of “Even if we don’t live in the house with the kid who wishes people into the cornfield, his house is in our town, and everything he does affects us no matter how hard we try not to let it oh god we’re all gonna die” in the world.
So in an effort to just kind of take the intense seriousness of it all off the table for a minute, I’m using the most ridiculous theme I could find, to inspire me to just blog like it’s 2003 and nobody’s reading. This post will make less sense in the future, when I change themes again, but if this trick works, it won’t be three months before I post something new here.