In June 2009, I started a blog. I had no idea what on earth that would come to mean to me, but it was a trendy new thing that a few people I knew were dabbling in, and I wanted a place where I could post pictures and memories of my newborn so that family could keep track of how he was growing while I could look back and remember what made those first months of motherhood special.
That blogging journey became a game changer for me. I never did become one of those famous bloggers with hundreds of followers. I haven’t earned any money from any of the blog posts I’ve written, and there have been many times in more recent years when I seriously considered shutting the whole thing down.
Even so, blogging changed me. It helped me see some really important things about myself. As I wrote more in the first few years of the journey, I learned how much I absolutely love writing. I came to see myself as a writer because I sat down and did the thing on a regular basis. I have always liked to write, which would explain the degree in English, but I began to see the a joy that could not be compared to writing the stories of my life as well as the lives of those I love.
Being a writer allowed me to connect with people in a completely different way. There are many people I have never met in real life that I now know and love because of our writing connection. This is a treasure that has brought me happiness, but even more surprising to me was the way I was able to connect with people I already knew. There’s something far more powerful in saying what’s in my heart through the written word. I learned that through blogging, and it slowly changed my life’s mission to a more focused one.
The momentum to write and connect kept growing over the first few years. I researched about writing and blogging all of the time. After teaching myself how to set up and maintain a working website and then writing an e-book, I scaled back a bit around the time that my daughter was born. It turns out there wasn’t quite as much free time when kid #1 stopped taking naps at the same time that kid #2 didn’t figure out how to be a good sleeper for the first couple of years of life.
As much as I grew to love reading about being a good writer and learning and practicing how to be a better blogger, I also started feeling the need to slow down in the virtual world so that my kids didn’t see me constantly staring at a screen. Several key parts of my little world started crumbling shortly after that, and that’s when I got really lost when it came to writing. I lost a good deal of my audience and didn’t feel that I was free to write openly.
Writing stories about real life is tricky business, and while I believe it is important to write through the hurts that inevitably come in life, it is even more important to know two things:
1. Your why
2. Your audience
My “why” for a very long time was personally working through some serious loss that hit our family. We were all devastated and changed forever. Parts of the narrative I was living were not mine to tell and could potentially hurt some of my remaining audience. I know that there are many wise words out there about the importance of being bold and sharing your voice in writing, but I also came to learn something even more wise.
There is a time to refrain from words.
Not completely, mind you. I wrote a lot of nonsense for myself. I read a lot. I sought wisdom from people I trusted, and when the timing was right, I shared pieces of my story with people I met along the way.
Blogging consistently might have faded, but now I was emerging as someone who knew what it meant to write, live, and share a story. So I began teaching again and have met many people who have moved me to laughter as well as tears with their stories, but most of all they have inspired me as a both a writer and a human.
So here I am, nine years after I sat with one hand holding a sleeping newborn while the other clicked on tutorials that could explain what a blog even is, reflecting on the journey and feeling challenged to push myself once again. To write more about what matters, and sometimes even about things that are just fun. To put my words out there for an audience to take or leave depending on what they have going on. To do what it takes to be able to call myself a writer: write.
While it is wise to refrain from words for a time, it should never be forever. I have learned some valuable lessons in my time of not putting very many words on here, and it would be a waste of those lessons to hold it all in forever. So here we go. This is my rambling attempt to live out what I teach: Know your why and share your story, even when the draft’s not that pretty, because it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.