Hard to believe I took a 5 month plus hiatus from blogging. Truth be told there are several reasons, which typed "outloud" in no particular order would be:
1. I have a love/hate relationship with social media.
Honestly, I feel a bit bi-polar about the entire thing. I think it is great and wonderful while at the same time scary and overwhelming. It is a freeing sensation to have the control to share what you want with the world. Like you have a say and other people "have to/get to" listen. It is equally as terrifying to think that what you share with the world can never be taken back. It could also, one day, unexpectedly, be used against you. It is fun to see pictures of friends, baby announcments, moves, new homes, etc. But it can also make you feel like you are 5 years behind in child-rearing, need to buy a bigger house, document your vacations better and feel guilty when you come home from work on a Tuesday, watch TV in your elastic waisted PJs and have nothing interesting to Instagram or hashtag about. It keeps you connected with the world and at the same time can make you feel entirely alone. You can get incredible ideas and enjoy HOURS upon HOURS of craft-time, cooking with friends and "buying things", while at the same time make you feel as though your decorations, recipes, home decorating is never going to be enough. So in a nutshell I think it is great, but then I hate it. The past 5 months I was feeling less than steller about the entire thing.
2. Life got in the way.
I want to say life got busy, but isn't life always busy? If it wasn't, blogging would be IMO-only posts. Where would all the real-time life activities be? But the last 5 months it has felt like a different kind of busy. It felt right to take a break from blogging about my oh-so-perfect world and spend time enjoying my real-life-blessed-but-sometimes-difficult world. i.e. Reality. Living in the moment I believe they call it. I got caught up in going to events just for the pictures so I could go home and blog about it. I got updates on my friends through their blogs rather than actually talking to them. It all started to feel a little fake. So I hit the "reset" button. I just recently read a blog (http://iambeggingmymothernottoreadthisblog.com/) that made fun of having inner peace and happiness by doing yoga on the top of a mountain, or looking peacefully upon the waves of a perfect beach. It said, do what (the bleep) you want. I like that approach, do what you want, when you want it. In the past I have been, do what you want because you "should." I started a blog, kept up with it, started veiwing it as a chore, continued doing it, until one day I just stopped. And I have not felt like blogging again until today. So who know what tomorrow will bring. Maybe a regularity of posts - maybe nothing.
3. I started taking less pictures.
What is a blog post without pictures (besdies this one). I mean, something has to break up all the text! For the picture queen (ahem, me!), I can confidently say my lack-of-picture took us all by surprise! I haven't used my magic making/fancy camera since the hiatus. What.The.Heck. Again, I just didn't feel like it. I think it was the whole step of having to download the pictures to the computer and then upload them. #laziness
4. My relationship with Social Media continues to evolve.
Social media in some form or fashion is here to stay. My question continues to be - where will our (me and the internet) relationship end up? Social Media and I started our relationship by going steady in college, my first "one" if you will, with AIM instant messanger and "awesome" away messages that let people know how cool we were because we weren't in our dorm room. It notified others that we had friends - and (wait for it) we were out with those friends. We could brag about being at our sorority house, or parties with the fraternities. And then it could hurt your feelings when other people posted they were out with your ex-boyfriend. Then Facebook came out and I thought, ok man, let's take it to the next level. Now you can see pictures and we can "poke" each other. And we kept up a solid, laid back, relationship for years. Never really sharing that much, but just enough to keep each other interested. I made sure to upload pictures every once in awhile, and Facebook didn't let me forget my password. Then Facebook decided it wanted to see other people, not just us college kids. And so it got weird. So many "adults" and "kids" started wanting to be "friends." No thanks. Being a stubborn, Italian "woman" I put my foot down. But it reeled me back in with its alluring curiousity to see what my friends were up to. Facebook and I were on and off for years. We grew in our relationship and set some ground rules like "no more bikini pictures," "keep the drunk pics to a minimum" and "do not ever accept a work colleague as a friend." Facebook understood that I needed my privacy and wasn't going to let strangers into our relaionship. I'm pleased to say we continue to follow those same rules today. Things like Four Square and Come Rob My House (I mean, "check-in") came and I said "I'm a one woman Social Media kinda girl." Games became available on Facebook and I said "let's keep the TV out of the bedroom." Twitter came and straight up irritated me. It was aggressive with its "at" signs and "hashtags." Why are there so many constanants in the same sentence. I subscribed to those who said "Social Media is taking over," "Kids these days won't know how to write in complete sentences because they can only talk in 140 character phrases." I said no to bringing Twitter into our lives. But then Twitter never went away and I got curious. Not like, "let's kiss a girl in college to say we 'experimented' type curious" but more like "what am I losing out on by only dating one social media site?" So Facebook and I continued until I couldn't resist any longer. What were all these ####s about. I signed up, Facebook understood, tweeted about 36 times, got overwhelmed and things fizzled. Twitter didn't respect my privacy like Facebook, and honestly I just felt old and confused by "the kids these days." The one thing I did take away from my relationship with Twitter was a love of #hashtaguse. Talk about exhilerating. And who knows why. I love it. Honestly it isn't that special. It is a group of words that need not be grammatically correct, no punctuation necessary and has a number sign in front of it. But still, #heartmelt! Without Twitter though I had to say goodbye to the adorable hashtag. #Nicewhileitlasted. Until, that is...INSTAGRAM. Instagram took the best of Facebook and Twitter: Pictures (that you can make look ah-mazing) with a #caption. So now I exist in an average relationship with Facebook and Instagram with blogging and Pinterst ever-so-ready for me on the side.
To make my point here - social media is here to stay. We have been together for over 10 years, we have shared a lot that can (literally) never be taken back and deep down we really really like each other. So what the future has in store... who knows. Might be more blogging, pinning, posting and hashtagging - or we might decide to keep our relationship on the downlow and silently stalk our fabulous friends and (sometimes) wonder if their lives are better than ours.
5. The last reason (although again there was no particular order to this list) is personal. And after making points 1-4, we will see if personal ever makes public.
Until then...Welcome Back!
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