My Writing Job Killed My Writing Hobby

The Hubster and I had a weblog-like thing before that’s what they were called. We posted pictures and wrote captions describing our activities. He posted graphs of his weight loss versus my pregnancy gain. No one read blogs, so we sent e-newsletter-ish messages updating everyone we know that we’ve updated our webpage.

It didn’t take long for blogging platforms to become all the rage and I was on it. I even dabbled with vlogging. Turns out that takes a certain moxie I don’t have. I started this blog and dreamed of getting the call all indie bloggers hoped for at that time — the “blog for me” job offer. I got that in 2010 and my writing changed.

My life changed too. Many bloggers who didn’t go the job route but the entrepreneurial route instead, hustled up advertisers and contributors and built communities around their own interests. That’s all great and I’m so totally envious, but I didn’t think that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to keep my quiet little life with my own thoughts, my environmental micro-movement and a focus on my kiddos. I need to take inventory to see if I managed that.

My writing is geared for promotion now, not insight. My mind is on how to engage, not to create community but to improve metrics. Documenting the little experiments and quiet moments at home is all but over. I cling to shared reading (right now The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). We still do projects, sometimes. I even share through social media, though it doesn’t give me the same satisfaction as telling the story behind the moments.

I have a plan to scrape some of the better content that I’ve written for my employer and cross posting it here. It’s almost true to my voice. Maybe just that little effort will reignite the desire to make my own accounting and refocus my attention on the heart of my home and not just the functioning of it. Maybe… if I actually do it.