oh hello there

I've had a lot of time to think during this blogging...sabbatical. I was getting sucked into the blogworld and started wanting to be well known for my blog/life. I started thinking I want lots of readers who think I'm hilarious and ask me what I'm wearing and where I got such-and-such and are jealous of my life and think we're BFFs even though we've never met and companies want to send me free stuff to review on my blog for publicity's sake... I bought a legit domain name and everything. Then I realized that I was terrible about blogging regularly when I was really trying, and that growing a blogfollowing takes effort and time- two things I don't really have an abundance of. Most of the blogs I read are from people who don't have regular jobs with time constraints and responsibilities. Also, nightshift and what it does to my life. So I thought about why I started blogging to begin with, and what this space means to me...and I realized a few things.

I mainly started sharing my thoughts with the internet as a way to keep my parents off my back when I was in college. It was the perfect way to share and include them in what I was doing without having to tell them everything, or worry about the time difference and scheduling conflicts. If you go back and read my college blog, you'll see that it's mostly just life updates- this is what I did over the weekend, we had a really great time at this party, can't wait to travel to this place and see these people etc. Somewhere along the path of late adolescent melodrama I started channeling my LiveJournal days and wanted to share my profound thoughts and startling life conclusions with total strangers, so I started a different blog about my musings. Writing has always been therapeutic for me, and I'm not always very good about opening up to others so I wasn't completely surprised when people mentioned to me that they liked hearing my opinions and thoughts. When I graduated from college, blogging had become a fairly regular part of my life, and since my family has always been so spread out, I knew it would be something I continued to do, but I started fresh here, where you'll find life updates mixed in with a few op/eds and for a while, a lot of grief writings. It was the response to those that made me think maybe my writing is for more than just me- and the life of a "lifestyle blogger" does sound pretty sweet. But I noticed how many people were trying to do exactly the same thing, and in all of the times my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, not once was that my answer.

So I stopped worrying about blogging and focused on actually living my life, and I have to say that the last few months have been pretty great. School ended up being more work than I expected (surprise, surprise) and I've finally found the sense of community that I've longed for since I left Valpo. Both of those things left me with less time to spend on the internet than in previous months, and I stopped being so concerned about my "blog life."

And yet, a part of me missed it. Sitting down to write gives me time to process and sort my thoughts. I've also really enjoyed being able to look back at what I was doing last week, month, year and it's encouraging to see the growth over time. So I thought more about what this blog means to me, and I decided to bring it back to life. It certainly isn't the first time I took an extended break and it probably won't be the last. But hopefully over the course of the next few months, if you visit this space you'll find pictures and updates, nightshift ramblings, and maybe even thoughts about what I'm working on in school and how that translates into future career moves. If that interests you, than feel free to join me and comment as you feel led. If you're bored by that, it won't hurt my feelings if you'd rather have a conversation with me than read my blog. I'm pretty much only writing for myself these days anyway :) Thanks for being interested in what runs through this crazy head of mine!