And I Am Telling You, I'm Not Goin'

I'm writing a really terrible Top Ten! Hi internet! What are you wearing! It looks RAVISHING!

Here's the thing: it's hard to maintain a personal blog for a long time. One reaches a juncture when one must either pop out a fried chicken baby or eight (therefore providing lots of baby stories, nap/diaper opinions etc.), stop blogging, or stop writing about themselves and start writing about sports, or shoes or something.

I feel a lot of anxiety that I haven't updated in many days, maybe 'cause I'm all about the follow through? But at the same time, I'm so just really truly happy about this new project and I've been waking up feeling more energized about my work and excited for the day's unraveling than I've been in as long as I can remember, perhaps since some really engaging classes I've taken in college and high school.

This comes at a time when I recently had a final straw of sorts with a girl I considered -- and said as much, to her -- my sister. She was a big cheerleader for me. Even if it wasn't true, it helped me and it felt real and empowering. I mean don't forget: when a madwoman shouted nonsencial insults to me, it too felt real and still feels real. I haven't forgotten a word of it. Whether any of those conversations were real -- the good ones I had with (uh huh) her, or the bad ones I had with another Her -- their emotional impact was cavernous as sky. Of course I'm lucky to have plenty of amazing friends in my life who've always been there and I know always will be -- Haviland, Natalie, everyone on Team Autostraddle and more ... but that doesn't seem to lessen my sense of what's missing.

I've sort of hinted at this in my last few posts, and it feels tacky to say it all outright, or even to go into any more detail than that, but it's left this strange hole inside me. But I think I have most of my feelings in this weird gray matter that doesn't have its own noun yet because that space is like the "opposite of "noun," it's "adjectives waiting for a noun and they will never find it but that's FINE." So it's just always a bit harder to navigate in the fog.

I don't know why I feel I need to apologize for taking five days off when only two or three people have expressed anything remotely similar to demanding an apology. Because I don't know how the new facebook works I'm not sure if Lozo has registered a complaint quite yet. So I ramble. Typetypetype.

When I said two weeks ago that I'd be back to a regular schedule here within a week, I was totally wrong -- if anything, every day has contained more and more things to do -- good things! - but things.


So what I'm saying is that I've been doing this long enough that I hope -- despite my complete weirdo-hood -- that you know I'm not going anywhere.

If anything I hope that going forward my posts here will be better than before. They will be more necessary.

Writing on the internet is fucking scary because I have about a bajillion words in the archive of this blog that probs haven't been combed over in months. I write something new and the old fades away, and that can be disheartening, and the temporary nature of it makes it easy to get away with sucking sometimes.

And I'm in that same spot I was in this time last year where I felt like I'd already said all the stuff about myself I was willing to say and every Top Ten I started to write required 40 searches of the archives to be sure I hadn't already said it. That's followed by an hour of self-doubt -- "Who am I kidding? Who would even remember what I said in June 2007?"

[That being said, when I don't update for a week, check out the ARCHIVES!]

I don't want to say something just to say something, I want to say something because I have something to say.

So if you've been here for a while you know that I never run out of things to say, and I haven't. I just need a bit more time to figure out how to say them, or for it to come to me in the night.

And I do hope to be back up to reasonable speed (aside from autofun, I haven't really been doing more than one or two full blog posts a week for a long long time now) once Autostraddle is established enough that I can stop freaking out about the financial risk I'm taking (and I wouldn't even be where I am with it were it not for the generosity of readers like you) and when things are running more like those well-oiled machines I hear of so often. I comfort myself, as I so often do, thinking of how Emily Gould doesn't post as much as she did before she became Emily Gould, but when she does, I think it's worth it.