Would You Be Embarrassed For Me if I Titled This Post “Free to be Me!”?

When I posted about losing my job, a very kind and helpful person left the following comment:

You have 2500 posts in “uncategorized”. And you were managing social media for a company that is supposedly teaching people how to blog?

Okay then.

So helpful! No, seriously. Even though I know the person was kind of being a dick, what they were saying was true. Working for TheCompanyThatShallNotBeNamed made it almost impossible for me to put any time into this blog. I was too busy reading and promoting over 3,000 blogs 5 days a week. That left little time or desire for me to write anything of my own.

Turns out that uncatergorized posts were the least of my worries. Just after I lost my job, my blog was hacked, infected with malware and a complete disaster. Luckily, my kind, talented, generous, all around awesome friend Joelle offered to help me get things fixed and back online. A few days later, I had a new blog host and a beautiful new design. I felt inspired to write again, to become part of the blogging community again.

But those uncategorized posts weighed heavy on my mind, so I decided to go through them and fix the archives up a bit. It took me a couple of weeks, but I went through every single post. It was a trip reading back through the last 12 years of my life. I cringed, A LOT. Depression isn’t fun and reading back through that time was painful. I’m not very proud of who I was 12 years ago. Many of the posts made me cringe. But I’m grateful that I was able to go back in time and remember where I’ve been and appreciate how far I’ve come. The stories I’ve written about my children throughout the past 12 years are one of the best things I’ve done in my life. I would have forgotten so many little, but wonderful life moments were it not for this blog. (Like the time my daughter told me she loved me more than going to the bathroom. Or the time I made the ugliest cupcakes EVER for Ethan’s class on his birthday.) It was evident that my children have always been my comfort, my joy and the thing that I love most in life. I can say that I am proud of the woman, mother that I am now.

Now that this blog has been fixed and things are in order, I feel like I can start over again. I want to write about my life, my kids, my feeeeelings like I used to. I want to build the community back that I once had here with my readers. I want to be myself again without having to censor myself to protect someone else’s brand.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this inspired. Whether it be writing or photography, I look forward to expressing myself creatively again.