It feels as though the post on my one-year anniversary of blogging ought to be profound. I started off trying to write something like that, but it’s not working and will be relegated to another post, another day.
New Year’s Day usually feels quiet to me. A calm before the bustle of January, when the it’s-the-holidays excuses for being lazy or skipping out early no longer work. That’s what January 1, 2011 felt like to me.
I have a vivid mental picture of that day, which I don’t have for most New Year’s Days (tending, as they do, to all blur together). I had spent New Year’s Eve 2010 in the usual fashion—with Chinese food followed by blissful nothingness—with one critical difference. That last night of 2010 I sat on the floor of our living room, in front of the fire, and set up a blog in WordPress.
It was totally unplanned. I had been thinking about writing about my experience with motherhood, but I hadn’t really thought about it being so specifically about PPD and I really hadn’t thought about getting into blogging. And yet there I was with wordpress.com on the screen in front of me and before I knew it this blog was born.
It was a short time later that I became Farewell Stranger, but at that time I was simply MamaRobinJ. I had a basic blog and a Twitter account (because I didn’t want to use my professional Twitter persona for this very personal project) and I decided I was going to do it. And then I went to bed.
The next day, during the quietness that was January 1, 2011, I got a direct message on my other Twitter account from my boss. “MamaRobinJ is a great idea,” he said. And my heart exploded in holy-shit-fuelled adrenaline.
That was the start of what became a slow progression towards having it be okay to talk about this. I would say a year later I’m 95% there – it’s still not something I bring up early on when I meet new people, and the people at my new job don’t know this about me yet (unless they’ve Googled me, in which case hi!). But it’s no longer an oh-God-please-don’t-find-my-blog sort of thing.
For I guess that’s the beauty of blogging, isn’t it? It can be whatever we want. If we want to be anonymous, we can. If we want to use it to say, “This is who I really am. This is my experience. Do you still love me?” we can.
One year later, this is who I really am. And not because I hid who I was, but because this blog, and those of you who have been with me during the last year, have allowed the protective shell I placed around myself to crack and let the light in.
One year later, this is who I really am. Because you still love me.
Image credit: ms.Tea on Flickr
So today, on this New Year’s Day that feels not quiet but alive with possibility, I wish to say thank you. Thank you for this last year. Thank you for loving me.
Have a cupcake.
A perfect way to start 2012, I would say.
