Missing Blogger Comes Up for Air

Recently several friends who are not on Facebook reached out to me asking if I’m OK. They wondered why I haven’t blogged in months. Four months, to be exact. Today I received a message from the blogging platform I use, asking if I still want to receive comments left on my posts. Since I rarely received comments when I was actively blogging, I took this message as their way to ask: Are you still blogging?

I decided to write a post explaining where I’ve been and letting folks know that yes, I’m still among the living, if just barely. Without getting too deep into the weeds, here’s why I stopped blogging.

My style is primarily social satire. There’s a person in the public eye who is an obvious target for this type of humor. He had been a rich source of material for my blogs for over a year. I always put a link to my blog posts on my Facebook page. I learned that many of my Facebook friends either don’t understand or don’t appreciate satire. Especially if it’s directed at said focus of my writing. The resulting vitriol in the comments on my posts led me to discontinue sharing my opinions.

For awhile, I still wrote for pleasure, but published in other outlets where the readers appreciate my style and mindset. The more the behavior of our national leaders descended into policies and language that I found alarming and offensive, the darker my world became. Simply put, I lost interest in writing just about anything. I spent many afternoons sprawled on the couch watching Hallmark channel romcom movies. Some of them for the third time.

For the past month, my days were more consumed helping my husband recover from his first knee replacement surgery. Everything went far better than anticipated, but the household schedule changed dramatically. Instead of being here for 2 ½ days a week, he was here full time. Meaning more grocery shopping and meal preparation, and multiple drug store runs. Since he was on the couch in the family room, I began working again on a book that I started about six years ago that’s been on the back burner.

I took my husband back to his store in Providence yesterday. So it’s a good time to decide whether to crawl back into my dark hole or come up for air. The recent passing of Senator John McCain provided more incentive to get on with my life. He was a decent man and true hero, no matter what you might have thought of his politics. I reflected on McCain’s exhortation in his final letter to all of us: “Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here.”

Punctuate that with the not-surprising debacle around the White House flag. The inquiry from my blogging platform was the final push. While I still “despair of our present difficulties,” I’ve decided it’s time to get back to the writing I enjoy most. That means I’ll come down off the “high road” some of the time. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of company down there in the muck and the mire. If I offend some of you, if you have strong opinions that differ from mine, save your vitriol for your own blog or Facebook posts. Stop reading mine. We’ll both be happier.