For a few years I wrote a blog about food. True to type, I changed its name and design on many occasions. I could never quite settle on what I wanted it to be like. I didn't want it to be yet another site of just recipes, but I love cooking and I loved to share what I made each day. It started out as a home grown food and gardening blog, a sort of tales from my tiny plot, then to a cooking blog and then it veered back towards home grown food when I took an allotment plot on.
The blog became something of an irritation to other members of the household who couldn't often wait for dinner while I carefully arranged it, took photos and then, quite often left the washing up to sit on the side while I uploaded the pictures, carefully edited them and then wrote a blog post about it.
When I think about it now I do think "did I completely waste my time?" or "should I have been channeling that energy into something that might have benefited us as a family?". I eventually gave up on it. Circumstance was the driving force behind the decision to quit not the actually want to give up, what had become my main hobby.
Why writing to a limited audience of complete strangers became such an enjoyment to me I don't know. Maybe its the social network culture we live in, the need to share every time our kids sneeze or maybe it was to fill a [now] obvious hole that was growing in my home life. Those strangers who commented on my posts became more of a source of comfort than the people around me. I spend more time with social medial strangers than with my husband. To even type that sentence really does make me quite sad. When we finally parted everything stopped, the photography, the blogging, the home grown food. Everything. All I could concentrate on was getting up, channeling everything I had into my son, and then getting back in to bed at night - completely drained.
I tried over the last year or so to get back in to blogging as I find it a great way to be creative and get certain things off my chest. I love to write, I am no JK Rowling and sometimes my grammar and vocabulary leaves little to be desired but I love it (and I don't have an expensive editor). But as much as I tried, every time I opened up the laptop and logged on to my blog I completely dried up. I had absolutely nothing to say and just ended up messing around with themes and fonts and getting nothing down on the page.
More recently that has begun to change. Whether its part of the healing process when going through a family breakup or not I don't know but I feel like that creative spirit is slowly beginning to return. I have even started thinking about getting out my paintbrushes and giving some old furniture I have a new lease of life.
I still am thinking of the direction in which I want to take this new blog. It might just end up being a mish-mash of the daily grind, a diary if you will but this time I am writing, not to fill a void but because I enjoy it. I don't intend on spending hours on it, making sure its hooked up to every avenue of social media available or that the photos are perfectly edited. It will be for me and if I don't write each day, each week or each month it won't matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment