Why I Started Blogging Again

...and why I stopped to begin with…

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I stopped blogging a couple years ago.  Honestly, I didn’t think anyone was reading my blog, so I was really surprised that anyone missed it.

So anyway, why I stopped?  Let’s just get it out there to begin with:  The last 18 months have been the toughest, worst of my life.  And if you’ve read beyond the first page of this blog, you know that’s saying a lot.  

The deaths of my father, father-in-law and uncle,  loved ones battling addiction, depression, and suicide attempts, financial crisis related to the aforementioned, as well as a flood that left me without a kitchen for 5 months, incredibly strained family relations and finally the discovery of several pounds of tumors in my lady parts, necessitating their removal and a five-week recuperation.

Yeah, it sucked.

So here’s the thing: That kind of stuff is really hard to write about. Now I know what you're going to say: I pretty fearlessly blogged through Kiersten’s death and the aftermath…how could anything be harder than THAT? But that was a personal journey. That was all about my feelings and my thoughts and my experiences.  By contrast, while I was really profoundly affected by what has happened in the last 18 months or so, very little of it was actually about me. This has been about other people whose story wasn’t mine to tell.  Let’s combine that with a new job that I really, seriously didn’t think I would ever learn to do well, and the associated panic and angst that went with that and really, there’s not a lot left to write about that’s anywhere near safe. Even if I could collect my thoughts long enough to write.

And as I said elsewhere earlier this week, sometimes our voices need to go quiet for awhile so we can hear the rest of the world and figure out where we belong in it.

Are things perfect now?  No.  But they’re better.  And I have enough of a sense of myself on my own terms again that I can start to write. I’m loving my job and doing it well, I think. While the family situation hasn’t been idyllic, it’s at least stable for now. And I have a working kitchen!

And there’s so much interesting stuff to write about again, stuff that takes more than the 30 words or so that make up a Facebook entry. Politics are as nail-biting as anything I can remember in my lifetime, I’m really digging on a lot of changes in healthcare policy, and there’s some really juicy science that is the foundation of all that and it’s really fun to debate and talk about. I’m not as actively grieving as I was for those first couple years after we lost K, (so Dear Readers, you don’t have to worry about the constant emotional ambush). Mostly, I’m not just treading water anymore and there’s time to reflect and think about what I think about now.

I’ll try not to be as preachy as I’ve been this past week, but good gravy there was a lot of material to work with in so few days! :-)  And I’ll try to sprinkle in the occasional cooking post and silly story when they happen (because Christy wants more cooking posts). 

So here we go again.  Thanks for being here.