Where To? And What Now?

One of the reasons I’ve been gone so long here, is I have been completely unsure of the answer to this question with regards to this blog. Where to? And what now?

I spent some time over the last few weeks going through old posts, sorting through all my old drafts and brainstorming material, hoping I might find an answer in them. Hoping I could find a thread to latch onto to tell me where to go and what to do next. How to ease back into posting here. How to ease back into writing about… something that’s not work.

And I’ve found myself at a major loss.

Those old posts? In some ways they feel like they were written by a different person. In a different place. Reading through them made me feel like an anthropologist, looking at examples from an unfamiliar culture.

Only I know they’re not.

And its not even like they’re about things I no longer have an interest in or anything. I still knit. We still have and love our dog. I still read a lot of the same shit, and do a lot of the same things for fun. I still have the same opinions about Outlander and SJM books…

It’s not the topics or the things I’m talking about in the posts that make it feel so disconnected from me… it’s something about the tone. It just feels too… light? Airy? Perky? Optimistic? Carefree? Fake?

Too young, maybe?

I don’t know. Whatever it is, it just feels… alien to me.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I very much know that the last couple years have changed me and my life in some pretty big ways, and I expected a bit of “oh wow this feels so long ago” kind of nostalgia looking back. I haven’t posted since 2019, after all – and not REGULARLY since even before that.

My life is different now. I am different now.  Hell, the whole world is different now. I know this, and expected this.

What I didn’t expect was exactly how foreign it would feel to me. And how much that would leave me floundering to answer the title question.

Where to? And what now?

Well, I don’t really know. So I guess let’s start with what I do know?

1) I don’t want to start from scratch. Actually, I kind of do…  but I just don’t have the energy, so I won’t.

2) I know I don’t really care about creating broadly appealing content anymore. Particularly like, advice kinda stuff. The “tips for this!” “tips for that!” kinda posts. I really tried for a while there in like, 2018. But idk… none of that feels like something I want to do right now. I think partly because the only stuff I’m qualified to give tips on anymore is school stuff, and after the last two years of pandemic hustle on that front… it just feels like more work. And as much as I used to have pipe dreams about maybe making some extra spending money from this blog somehow… I just really don’t need more work right now. I don’t need a side hustle. I never did. I have too many main hustles to juggle a side hustle in tandem.

3) I know I want to do more projects. More things with my hands that *make* something. I want to knit. I want to sew. I want to, believe it or not, paint. The one thing that has carried me through and helped me stay somewhat sane throughout the last few years of complete dumpsterfire clusterfuck shitshow has been that little endorphin boost I get when I finish a physical project. So I know I want to do more of that, and share more of that.

4) I, under no circumstances, want this blog to have anything to do with work. At least for a while. I do not want to make this a teaching blog, I do not want to make this a history blog, I do not want to give academic advice, I do not want to talk about politics or current events. Even though that would be a pretty easy answer to “Where to? And what now?” I just… can’t. Not here anyway.

5) There’s almost certainly going to be more dog and dog training progress content. There are a number of things I want to do with Haruka still, and additionally we are in the process of bringing another puppy into the family this year.  And uhhhhh Haruka made it VERY clear to me since I last posted about dog stuff that I did not know as much about training and raising a well adjusted puppy as I thought I did. We have since started working with an amazing trainer, and I think chronicling our progress here might be good/fun/helpful.

6) I think I might pull away from full book reviews for a while. Reading has been an important escape for me over the pandemic, but it’s been hard to get into the review mindset beyond “Omg that was really fun” or “meh.” I just don’t have the brain bandwidth. Idk, we’ll see what happens. I do still have half-baked reviews and review notes for the rest of the Throne of Glass series and the last two of the ACOTAR books… but I don’t know if I feel like revisiting them long enough to finesse my half-assed notes into full reviews or not.

So what does that leave me with to write about?

Honestly, I’m not sure.

But for those of you who want to come along for the ride as I figure that out, welcome aboard. Here’s to “Where to?” and “What now?”

– Maggie