Back Then

I'm posting three times this week, can you handle it? I hardly can.

But I'm actually having a really hard time finding things to write about these days. I went back to look at what I used to write when I started blogging - back when I sometimes blogged twice a day - and I know why I don't have anything to blog about anymore. It's self censorship.

I do it for a lot of reasons I didn't used to care about, and some that weren't even relevant at the time. Back then I was rarely read and even less "Googleable". It wasn't a thing to look a person up on the internet and find out their life story via their social media and blog. I had ten readers a day* and I could trace back their url's to people I knew. I wasn't spilling my life story out to strangers from Prahran, Australia or Shepperton, UK. How did these people find me? (By searching for unicorns.) What do they want? (To know who was the first person to milk a cow.) Why do they keep coming back? (It's the mystery of the ages.)

Back then I didn't know what a bad idea it was to write about work on a public site. I didn't think about anyone I worked with reading what I wrote, thus I was completely unabashed about giving the details of my job as well as my feelings about my coworkers. What a horrible idea that is! What was I thinking? Some days I still write about things that happen at work because they feel like personal failures or victories, but you will never find the gory details of my job on here now because people I work with read my blog. Hi people I work with! See you on Monday!

Back then, I was single. Oh the multitudes of things you can write about when you are single! The wins! The losses! The miserable, terrible, awful, no good, very bad dates. Of which there will be many. I learned, though, over the years, that men don't really like finding out about themselves on your blog. They don't like reading the details of your not-great date (which they thought when quite well), and if you keep dating them they hate reading about the spits and spats you have. If you marry them they hate having their personal life divulged at all. Or, at least Husband does. Which I have to respect. It's my blog about me, not my blog about us. And even though I might consider him a part of me, that is a part I must keep to myself. He gets embarrassed when I recount the tales of our warp speed Ikea adventures or his very deep love for our cats. (See how I did that Husband? I talked about it anyway. I'm such a jerk!)

After all that it leaves me very little to talk about. Work covers forty hours of my life and when I come home I am naturally with Husband which covers another forty some odd hours and the rest I'm sleeping - and we've established that the majority of people hate to hear about other people's dreams - so what is left? I can talk about the cats rather often, and of course I will talk about our fun outings and trips. Then what? Strip everything away that I can't talk about these days and I start to feel a little bit like a journalist, or how I imagine a journalist must feel. Which, consequently, is one of the reasons I never followed through with journalism.

So, I guess I am complaining but it's a pitiful complaint. My life is filled with good things. Sometimes those things are annoying or tedious just like any good things can be. Life isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts, no matter how smooth it's running. All this to say 'No news is good news', I guess. And that I'm still going to try to find things to write about here. I am, after all, a 'writer'.

Besides, in a couple of years I will be a 'mommy blogger' and all other things in my life will cease to exist, so take it what you've got people. The clocks a tickin'!

*I still only have ten readers a day.