Reasons to blog.... again.
Note to self.
On this November 1, in the year 2018, the day that #NaBloPoMo starts…
DO NOT get all nostalgic about the “good ol’ days of blogging” and decide to check your archives from 9 years ago.
Or wait, maybe I mean DO.
The get nostalgic part at least. (Please DO NOT go looking for my writing from 2009, it was seriously awful!) But the reasons I was writing, those are good reasons to get nostalgic about those days.
I wrote because I wanted to share experiences, I wrote because I needed to find my voice and then give it a place to “speak” the truths that I was feeling as a new parent and a new “stay at home” mother. And to be perfectly honest, I wrote to give my brain something else to do too besides endless rounds of peekaboo and the cleaning of dirty cloth diapers (you do remember that my original blog name was Natural Urban Mamas right?).
I read a lot in those days too. I read a lot of other #mommyblogs. Blogs the likes of which some of you have never seen. Award-winning, amazing blogs like Attack of the Redneck Mommy, Phd in Parenting, Girls Gone Child, Her Bad Mother, Dooce, Up Popped a Fox, mochamomma, and many, many others.
I miss these gorgeous faces too.
And I miss those days. I miss reading the stories from these women. Knowing their struggles, their triumphs, their thoughts that seemed to have been plucked directly out of my own mama brain and published on the internet just waiting for me to read them.
At some point blogging changed. We all know this. It became more and more about “monetizing” and becoming an “influencer” and working with brands and for some people that worked and continues to work and this is fantastic. But it changed things. Or maybe the world changed and that made blogging change.
What I know is I’ve never been good at the whole monetizing part of blogging. I have always just wanted to, I still just want to write. And this is my medium. This is where I share my stories. Where I work out my thoughts about the world and how I fit in it and how I work every day to make it a better place for the people I love.
So, in an effort to find that magic again, to bring back story telling the way we used to do it, a bunch of OG bloggers (I mean, I guess, I’m not officially 2006 OG, but I am OLD, so I’m lumping myself in with everyone else) are writing on our blogs again this month for #NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks (and co-host of my favourite podcast, Edit your Life) wrote this post as a catalyst for this conversation, and she thinks that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to heal a bit of our world by doing this.
“You know how Humans of New York is this tapestry of different peoples’ stories that somehow shines a light on what connects us? Our blogs could once again be that, writ large, distributed across geographical, political, racial, religious, ethnic and gender lines. No silos, no algorithms. Just real people sharing real stories so other people can read and comment and feel a part of those stories and be reminded about what connects us. Incubating community without a specific agenda beyond sharing of ourselves and connecting people.”
She may be right.
I really hope she is right.
So let’s connect.
Let’s do this thing, and write and comment and read again, and feel like we are part of something good and positive and hopeful.
Find the other blogs and bloggers doing this on Social Media using the hashtag #netpositiveblog.
See you tomorrow.
XOXO,