:: on why i'm not blogging (at least for now) ::

i blogged here regularly for almost six straight years - sometimes daily, sometimes less than that, but i was here often and happily.

and then this summer i just stopped writing.

for better or for worse i came to see that blogging was taking away from my ability - and my need - to communicate directly with the people in my life. i would put everything all on the line here on the blog and then sort of blindly hope that the people who i needed to know those things would read them, understand what they meant for me and for them, and respond in some appreciable and appropriate way.

and it does work that way sometimes. sometimes i write here about the things i find it really hard to say in real life, and then the right people read those things and eventually sort of find a quiet moment to tell me everything is okay or what i am feeling is normal or that they are feeling it, too.

mostly, though, it was other people - not the ones i was trying to kind of telepathically communicate with - who would pull me aside (literally or over email or whatever) and say that what i'd written had touched them and they found me brave and whatnot.

it will be those people who will bring me back to blogging if and when i return. it's those people who make me feel like blogging brings me closer to having some kind of meaning or purpose in my life. for whatever reason i'm blessed with a certain vulnerability and willingness to share that vulnerability, and i do feel like that vulnerability is the key to how i connect with and can help better the lives of other people.

but i've come to think that even though blogging honestly the way i do looks like bravery to a lot of people, for me it became a way of making myself less vulnerable and therefore less  brave. it makes me - has made me - less capable of being vulnerable with real people in face-to-face communication. i feel that is robbing me of something i need and that the people i love need from me.

blogging can't be my own means of communicating with the people in my day-to-day life. it can't be a surrogate for talking about what's happening in my life, how i'm feeling about it, etc., because it's too one-directional. i need to rekindle my ability to participate in bi-directional communication.

so i'm taking some time off. i'm not sure how or when i'll be back, but i do feel like i will want to eventually. i feel like i'll want to keep on making those crucial, vulnerable, brave connections with people i don't know. like i'll want to continue encouraging people to get the yucky stuff OUT into the world instead of inside their heads, and encouraging that by doing it. but i can't keep doing it at the expense of being able to get the yucky stuff OUT into my own daily world, if that makes any sense.

i've missed blogging the last few months, but i've also surprisingly not missed it. i haven't felt compelled to do it the way i used to.

am i communicating better in my life? maybe yes, maybe no. but at least i feel like i'm not doing the kind of indirect, smoke-and-mirrors faux-communicating i was doing before, writing all kinds of things and just hoping they'd magically get to their right recipients. so at least there's that.

see ya when i see ya.

(and if you want to keep up with my non-personal-business-y stuff, there's always the shop blog and my up up creative facebook page).