I stopped blogging.
I'm not sure why or when it started to crumble but I decided to just let it fade away into the background while other things came into focus. I became disenchanted with the blogging world on a whole because actual content was thrown to the wayside and it suddenly became about how well you could photograph your coffee and your Birkenstocks. It became all about branding and knowing "the right" bloggers and fucking "curating" (can we please put that word back into museums and not use it for a post on how to make rustic meatloaf?!). Things felt vapid and disingenuous. Things were just...things.
I'm no better. I took up the wonderful world of Instagram like any girl who wanted to major in photography and writing while making her life look like an Anthropologie ad. I was/am seduced by the endless opportunities to share and take in bits and pieces of life while spinning them in a delightful aesthetic. Some people described it as "micro blogging" and I thought "well, that seems like less work and it certainly looks prettier, so why not?"
But something was missing. It all still felt sort of empty.
I've been writing for as long as I can remember feeling really good when I did it. I felt like I was finally doing my mind a service and so I used it as an escape. I used it as therapy. I used it as a way to communicate the things my mind and my mouth couldn't unstick when people asked me "what are you thinking about". And then the Real World took hold. I had to recover from a divorce. I had to fend for myself and rebuild a world for myself and Jack. I worked. I got into a relationship. I worked some more. We started building a home.
In the midst of all of this I stopped writing. I justified it by saying "well, the blogging world is all fake bullshit anyway so what's the point?" But I neglected to remind myself that I've always done it for me and if I could do it again for purely that reason, maybe I would be able to write regularly again.
Maybe I wouldn't fill the void with hashtags and filtered peonies.
So, here I am again. I'm going to try this for the umpteenth time. And if you want to read along, I welcome you.
-Amanda
