Dear Friends,
I love you. You know I do.
Here's how much I love you. When I think of you, I look like this:
But I've felt guilty lately because I leave you hanging for weeks at a time with no SUPER WISE WORDS about the state of my pubic hair. And I feel guilty that (some of) you still hope I will post MORE things about my personal grooming habits. You check your reader, or type in my url and blammo...nothing.
It's not that I haven't been writing because I don't love you, or don't love writing, or don't love this blog.
It's that this blog grew and grew and grew and instead of it staying the cute little Kindergartner with whom I enjoyed both hand-holding while crossing the street AND semi-intelligent conversation, it became a surly teenager to the point where I really didn't understand it OR its music anymore.
Side note: you haven't felt confusion until your blog starts wearing black lipstick and a sour expression and is all zits, slammed doors and tense silence.
So imagine my delight when I recently read this article and found that there was a whole mess of people out there, like me, who thought, "Why am I pushing content just to push content?"
In fact, they're calling it "Slow Blogging." Erin Loechner says it best:
"We live in a world of more; this much is obvious. More things, more information. More time-saving tricks we use to find the time to uncover even more time-saving tricks....
I want less. I want less for this site; I want less for my life. I want to return to the days when I didn’t feel the need to “keep up” with the Internet. Where less truly was more, where editorial calendars didn’t exist and the words “I should totally blog this” were never uttered.
I miss the days when blogging itself was my muse. When the simple act of sharing something I stumbled upon was the joy itself, rather than a frenzied race to click link after link in hopes that I’ll have discovered something truly amazing."
There was a time when many of us, myself included, felt like daily blogging (or more) was the only way to be heard in an ever growing digital landscape of cute kittens and crazy recipes and snarky gossip blogazines.
But that's not why I started TNR in the beginning. I started this blog because I needed SPACE. I wanted a place to breathe deep into the part of me that needed to write, to share, to get my emotions out on a screen.
And sure, I could have just as easily kept a diary to do that, but ever since my divorce, it's been important to me that someone, somewhere can maybe benefit from the words I write.
The last year or so has shown me that I, in fact, have NOT been:
a) tapping that part of me that needed creative SPACE and
b) posting anything that has truly been helpful for anyone. (Well, except for this.)
I'll admit it's been a lot of navel-gazing and whining and filler posts with some vibrator reviews and f-bombs thrown in for good measure. And that, friends, is not only a disservice to me and my creativity, but a disservice to those of you who come here looking for something...more.
All that to say, I would like to get back to the original intent of this here blog...to share my experiences and stories with the hope that what I've been through, what I learn about myself and life and relationships, and the way I communicate it all to you is somehow entertaining and helpful.
What that means is, posts here will likely be longer, "soul-puke" type stories and anecdotes. They may require a cup of coffee, a blanket, and some heavy petting (what? You don't read with friends?).
I'll post on Thursdays or Fridays mostly, so you have time over the weekend to read, take notes, and compose your response essays. Or, you know, just read at work when you're bored and waiting for 5 o' clock to roll around.
I'll still have guest posts in the mix and if you'd like to submit one, I'm cool with that, too! I just figured, after looking at one my very favorite blogs (which is about cake, obvs) and realizing that in two years of weekly entries she has not had ONE throwaway post, that I could do the same.
I want to focus on value rather than frequency, joy rather than productivity, substance rather than filler.
And hell, there are plenty of other wonderful blogs out there that write multiple posts about the "Top 10 Ways to Lose Weight by Only Eating Curd" or "72 Reasons to Start Wearing Adult Onesies this Winter" that you don't need me to add my voice to that mix.
Let's slow blog this shit out of this space together, shall we?
Love,
TNR
PS--I'm already working on my piece for next week, tentatively titled, "Why My Parents Giving Me a Purity Ring at 16 was a Bad Fucking Idea." (No pun intended.)