When blogging fatigue strikes

You may have noticed that it’s been quiet around here lately. You may have also noticed that the blog’s been sporting a new look, but that I haven’t said anything about it yet.

I suppose I wouldn’t be a blogger if I didn’t get to the point where I wanted to stop blogging. I’ve been blogging since 2003, and I never really thought it would happen to me, but here it is: the dreaded blogger’s fatigue. Perhaps it’s inevitable in a blogger’s life, like a rite of passage.

For the last couple of weeks I haven’t even wanted to look at my blog. I’ve ignored the drafts on my editorial calendar, the folders of carefully selected photos on my desktop, the unwritten posts from New York, which was three months ago. It’s not that fun things haven’t happened to me in the last few weeks, or that I haven’t had great ideas; I just haven’t wanted to write about them.

What’s really sucked the soul from my blogging self is that my redesign didn’t end the way I hoped it would. After finishing my new logo and branding, and putting up a basic, functional blog in time for The Hive, the U.S.-based designer I hired just… disappeared. POOF! With a few hundred dollars of (fully paid) design work left to go.

No response to emails, no updates on social media, total radio silence for more than a month. (As a professional providing a service to a paying client, can you really ignore them for a month?!) I tried to be understanding and accommodating; I was actually worried, until I discovered that her LinkedIn profile was deactivated about a week ago. That sends quite a different message, doesn’t it?

I was so excited to talk about the redesign process. I had all these ideas, new things I wanted to do. And now, I just look at my blog and think—well, here’s something I sunk a lot of time, effort, and yes, money into. Now what?

This negative experience has been creatively draining. It’s made me want to mindlessly surf and not do anything. It’s made me want to get out and put my energy into other things—like my family, which always gives me back, multiplied by a hundred times, what I put into them. Or my career—oh yeah, I have a career, I forgot about that!

It’s also made me look at what I really want to do with this blog and say, it’s okay to slow down. I might never go viral or have an army of followers, but before I come down hard on myself for not achieving that, I’m taking this blogging slump as an opportunity to pause and think—is that what I really wanted anyway?

I care about telling stories, and our life, and the good things that happen to us. I care about words, and about wrapping them around moments to protect and preserve them. I care about my family. Maybe this blog became something else for me along the way, and it’s time to turn it back into a place for the things I do care about.

So, it’s been quiet around here, and it might stay that way for a while, I don’t know. Let me take this time to slow down and refocus, and let me just go get my blogging mojo back, disappearing designer be damned.

Even been in a blogging or creative slump? What caused it and how did you climb out of it? I’d love to know.

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