On Blogging

People who blog for a living impress me, really they do. At first I thought blogging for a living was a sorry excuse for a career, almost like a get rich fast scheme, but that was before I really started blogging. This actually isn't my first attempt at a blog, I'll have you know. When I first moved to New York I was inundated with so many things at one time (living on my own and living alone until the boyfriend moved in a few months later, then trying to learn to live with said boyfriend, living in this great, big, giant, scary, dark city, starting grad school, adjusting to constant criticism, poverty etc etc) I started blogging as a way to clear my head and as a way to get my thoughts down on "paper." There would be times that I was riding the subway and get this really big "ah ha" idea about life that I just had to expand upon somewhere. A blog seemed like the best place to do that...at the time. Needless to say, that blog didn't last very long and has since been permanently deleted. This blog, the one you are reading now started from a much more simple idea and for a very very different reason, but that reason is mine and mine alone to know. Ask me again when I'm being paid to blog.

The point of all this rambling, I swear there is a point, is to say that I didn't understand blogging until I really started doing it, but it hit me just today, just right now as I was coming back from lunch thinking about what I was going to write that this blogging thing can sometimes actually be really...hard. It can be, and often is, an investment of both your time AND your emotions. I haven't written in a week, but I meant to do that. I couldn't feasibly come away from that post and write something the very next day, or even later in the week. Last week's post was probably the hardest post I've written to date. It literally took me several hours throughout the course of the day to complete, and several drafts at that. Being as that I don't do this for a living, and let's be serious, don't have that many readers, taking a week off in between posts seemed like the right thing to do, for me. I needed some time to let that post settle but more importantly, I needed to make sure I was going to be all right; the jury is still out on that one.