Hi. Really….hi. If you’re reading this, you’re probably my family or someone who follows me on Instagram and has clicked on my blog link once or twice. (But you’re definitely not my husband who admittedly never reads my blog.)
I started this project back in 2020. In other words, the pandemic. A mom of two in 2020. You can probably guess where this is going. Home ALL the time (of course), not doing much of well…anything, except for raisin those two little darlings that inspired this thing in the first place. I needed something to do. I needed SOME kind of creative outlet. Something that made me feel like I was working on something and that the me that’s on the inside could somehow present to the outside. My eldest daughter was at the time 2.5-3 and my second daughter was 5 months when covid hit and lockdown began. That parenting phase was completely different than the one I’m in now. Now I have a six year old and a 3.5 year old- both going on 16. And months from now I’ll be in an even different phase, as the whole parenting thing goes.
In 2020, I had motivation to really do this whole blog thing. It has been something I had wanted to do for so so long and now I had the time and reason to do it. I worked hard at getting the back end set up and having so many posts on in order to have it go live. I loved doing it. And then after having done 30 posts, I realized that I should really look into learning SEO (search engine optimization- basically what lets Google find your blog) if I wanted this blog to be remotely successful, and at that time I did. I bought books, dug into other bloggers’ posts about it and then even paid someone to help teach me the basics- on zoom of course, given it was still 2020.
After that meeting with an SEO expert, I went from feeling inspired, hopeful and motivated to overwhelmed, confused and intimidated. That SEO backend mumble jumble is freaking scary for a creative brain. And if you have a creative brain at all, you know this. You know what I’m talking about. You know that our brains work in colors and ideas and dreams. You know that our brains work in the big picture, the concept, the creation. What my brain does NOT do well with is the technical, the jargon, the format. I just want to write and take pictures, mmmk? I don’t want to write in a specific way where my posts have a certain amount of key words and questions and links and so on. If you know me at all, you know that I don’t like anything or anyone telling me how to do something!
This SEO person had told me (as it was her job to, it’s what I hired her to do) that I would have to rewrite all 30 posts that I had already done, wsas none of them were SEO friendly or compliant. I downloaded a backend application that would be green, yellow or red based on how my post was doing up against their SEO requirements. And I got a lot of those little red faces, let me tell you. So what did I do? I stopped blogging. I shut down. Because when a creative brain gets faced with that technical stuff that literally looks and sounds like Russian, it runs. It hides. It wants to do anything but get through that hurdle. And then it procrastinates. Creatives are excellent at procrastinating. And building things up in their minds. Rather than just doing the damn thing.
I kept doing my Instagram once in a while because that’s quick and easy, but even that gets very disheartening when you have 4500 followers and Instagram shows your posts to around 150 of them.
And now it’s been two years (hides my face in shame). So this is me saying hi once again, because I’m back baby! And you know what? SCREW SEO. I realized that I can do this blog for ME and maybe you- but I don’t have to do it for SEO or “what’s best” or to “be successful”. I can just do it my way. Because after all…it is my blog. And this season of life has once again called me back into a creative awakening.
Life is all about seasons. Seasons of the year, of our families, our children. But also our energy and our needs. In the two years that I have been away from this platform, I have also sold and bought a house and renovated that house for the past year. So my energy has been on that. And raising my two girls, who keep me on my toes every day. So much of the last two years, coming out of the pandemic and into an entirely new season of life for me, has been about protecting my energy. Moving and setting up our life in a new home and renovating has taken up a LOT of my mental and creative space.
So I give myself grace for stepping away from here as well, because life calls for our focus on things in different ways and sometimes, you need to say, “This is all I have the time and energy for and that’s okay.”
But as our house renovations begin to settle and my girls can sometimes play on their own without asking for a snack or telling me who took what toy, I come into a season of having space again. Space for writing and creating.
So hi.
