It was 1998 and the internet was “new”. After creating my first website, I created a daily web-log. Web-logs were initially about updates to the website, so folks could see the history. It wasn’t long before the web-logs became blogs. Because I loved words, I soon joined in.  I wrote about file5951239550691daily life, seeking balance while working full time, managing children and trying to keep my marriage together. The blogging community was small back then.

Blogging wasn’t in vogue. We didn’t write because we were focused on building our “platform”. And it wasn’t about business – it was personal. We wrote because we needed to share our stories. We wrote because we needed to connect, be seen and be heard.  I made friends through my blog. We didn’t have comments, so we communicated via email and on the phone. To this day, I am friends with people I met in the early days. I wrote daily and hand-coded my blog in the early days. I had tried Blogger, but it wasn’t consistently up. I bought my first domain and migrated to hosted service. Eventually, I migrated to B2 and because I wanted to service the needs of other bloggers, I created website themes for them.Writing allowed me to begin to understand who I was and what made me tick. Writing helped me work things out.

When life changed, my blogging habits changed, too. In the midst of my divorce (2004), I stopped writing so much. Then, like all habits, I slowly got away from the habit of writing. The work I was doing demanded more discretion.

I missed personal writing. Yet, it didn’t fit my lifestyle and didn’t feel like a safe way to express the happenings of my world. Besides, blogging was changing. Folks said we needed a “niche” for our blogs. People blogged about their businesses.

I wrote on and off. Mostly off. My website name and location changed. I did some anonymous blogging here and there.

I kept coming back to blogs because I missed writing. I missed sharing the pieces of my story.

When I began the process of moving to Ohio, creating a shared life with JB and then restructuring my business life, work began taking the lion’s share of my writing time. A weekly professional blog demands attention. A weekly newsletter demands more attention. The creation and maintenance of courses around clarity and unleashing the core of who you are take time – as does the maintaining of my professional social media spaces and “growing my platform” by writing for larger websites.

It’s been sixteen months since I’ve written anything publicly personal that wasn’t work related in some way. And, here we are sixteen years and sixteen months later.

I’m making no promises about how long I’ll be writing here in this space again because I wish to tell no lies.

I re-opened and refreshed  this space so that I would be able to participate in Holidailies. Writing daily feels like a stretch and a push and a pull, yet deep down I know that it’s something I need. To nourish myself and nourish my muse.