Can even a blog be resurrected?

April 2, 2021

For many reasons my writing here has dried up to barely a trickle.

One of the big reasons is that the subject of most of my musings, those written and those that remain unspoken, are my children. And as my fellow mommy-bloggers know, children reach an age in which you can’t write about them anymore and you doubt the wisdom and fairness of everything you ever did publish about them. #mommyguilt

Also, blogging became so cumbersome over the years, burdened by technical problems and processes and the need to promote everything you write on all the right social media channels, cuz who reads blogs anymore?

I happen to be a deep thinker and writing was and is a tool to help me know and articulate those thoughts. But the deeper and more convoluted those thoughts are, the longer it takes to excavate and publish them. A blog post would take me a month to write and publish. And then you had to promote it. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

Blogging lost all its joy for me. And became pure discipline. But there is only so much space in my life for tasks, obligations, and responsibilities that are pure discipline.

I want to feel enlivened by as many things in my life as possible. Blogging was not one of those things.

I’m going to try something new here to see if I can find the joy again because I’d be sad to have blogging exist in a closed chapter of my life, rather than an open one. At 45 years old many things in my life exist only in the past and the last couple years have been tinged with that grief. I don’t want blogging to exist in that space, if only because I don’t feel like grieving one more "I used to..." loss.

Now that I’m in grad school I have a place where I can indulge my deep thinking side and am even rewarded for doing so. No social media promotion required.

I don’t know how and if my grad school work/writing and my blog will converge but I’m not going to try and figure that out right now. So many things to figure out.

What I’m going to try in this space are short posts. I know. I haven’t written short posts for many, many years. But posting regularly to Instagram where there is a character limit has trained me some.

The thing about Instagram is that the platform is owned by someone else and I have felt a little unsettled about solely publishing on a platform where accounts can be removed with no recourse. I'm unsettled by a lot of things, but where I publish my ideas is something I have control over.

What publishing to Instagram has shown me is that I am able to put some thoughts together, in less than 1,000 words, and not spend days doing so. Write, publish, done. Of course the benefit and whole point of publishing to Instagram is that there is an audience. Whereas with blogging, who knows?

I’m reaching my time limit for this morning’s writing. That’s another thing: I’m giving myself a time limit, if not an exact word count limit.

So this is a thing I’m trying. Can I revive a neglected, tiresome, and worn-out routine in my life? I hope so. I don’t want to keep saying goodbye to practices and parts of myself that I’ve loved and have defined me over the years. The Buddhists would have something to say about this, something about attachment and letting go.

But it’s Easter weekend and I’m not feeling very Buddhist about things. I’ll go with the resurrection this time.