The day the blogging died

Sometimes it's easy to forget that I've been separated from my ex-husband for less than two years. It's easy to forget because I recovered fairly quickly, through a combination of lucky circumstances and very hard emotional work in the year after we split up. But the death of a marriage -- especially one of significant duration -- often brings with it the death of an entire life structure. That certainly occurred in my case. A house and land to which I was deeply attached was sold. My entire life was uprooted and relocated back to my hometown. My job moved out of my home office and back to my downtown office.

And my blog died.

By May of 2008 I had created two distinct but vibrant little online communities, one of which I had largely "completed" and was no longer posting on, and one which was very much intact and thriving. I mean, we're not talking anything huge here -- but Mountain Time represents, in my mind, a body of work. Impacts were made. Connections I value deeply were built. And when my life snapped so suddenly, I knew that was over. Mountain Time was about that old life. But beyond that, my ex-husband had the link to that blog, and I knew I wouldn't be working through those issues in a place to which he had any access whatsoever. So, goodbye, Mountain Time.

Ultimately, I simply moved the core part of the community to another site, and then another. Those are still in existence, but locked to everyone but the people who existed in that core. I'm fine with that. The writing I did during that year is some of the best I've ever done, and it's also some of the most vulnerable and raw. And it's not public, at least for now.

But then all that wound down, and I'm in an entirely different place. But in that intervening year, something happened. I got on Facebook. And blogging seemed to have wilted a bit in the interim. And so I tried to post more on Mountain Time, and failing that, started this site. But something's missing -- well, what's missing is a month's worth of posts. I never had a problem posting before -- oh, maybe a week would go by from time to time, and I'd always find myself back, typing away furiously at some thing, real or imagined, that had occurred or that I had read.

Set aside for a moment that, in a world of facebooking and tweeting, blogging seems almost passe. I get that, but while Blogger is a dinosaur, it's my dinosaur. As I pondered the issue this morning, I realized how much time I used to devote to working on those sites. I noted in a comment below that part of it is the difference between the relationships I was in. I had time I needed to fill before. Now, my primary relationship is just more of a constant presence in my daily life. And if I'm honest, we're still early enough on that a small part of me wonders what he might think about some of the things I might write. That worry had remained mostly unconscious until this morning, when I realized it was just part of the backdrop of fear that is, these days, just something I must deal with in a relationship henceforth.

So, as is my inclination now, I just decided to crack it all open for all to see. Sunlight!

In short, I think the solution is an experiment. I'll be hanging out here for awhile instead of so frequently on Facebook. I think I'll see what happens.