writing

I started blogging a long time ago. It wasn’t called blogging when I first started, but looking back, that’s what I was doing on bulletin boards, etc., and I’ve had several blogs on different platforms and on my own website, with a few different names, since the mid-90s.

My favorite blog was called “Friday’s Child,” and was hosted by a site called journalspace in 2003 or so. I loved that site, and nothing has come close in all the years since to the sense of community I found there. The site died in 2006, and with it, “Friday’s Child.” I started another blog after that, and hosted it on my own site for a few years. I started on WordPress,com in 2008 with a blog called “Green Tea and Gratitude,” and found my way to “The Electric Idealist” about 10 years later,

My last post on The Electric Idealist was soon after I retired. Much has changed for me in the last 2.5 years, and though I’m probably still an idealist, I’m no longer electric in the way I was then. (Uranus was transiting my rising sign, and if you know astrology you’ll understand the reference. If not, don’t worry about it.) LOL!

So,,,now. New life, new blog, new name.

I retired at the end of 2023, and I feel like I’ve changed a lot since then, In 2024 I was just trying to relax and trying to find my way back to a life without the stress I had experienced in the 3 years prior to retirement. I worked in public health and the pandemic and some other things were difficult about that job, and I was so happy to be free of it, though I was and still am, very proud of ACME Health Services and the work we did in the 24 years I was on staff.

Last year, I just enjoyed life, for the most part – doing the things I love and now had more time for – expanding my art journaling practice, writing most days, riding my bike, reading, sitting in my backyard in the summer, just breathing in the sights and smells for hours at a time.

This year, I feel like a different person altogether. A combination of “old” me and “new” me, and definitely a more relaxed me. Still full-time caregiver to my mom, who will be 94 this month, but with a lot more time for myself and the things I like to do in the place I like to do it – my little house.

So I’m returning to blogging, which is something I have done and continued to love for nearly half of my life.

In 2003, when I started the original Friday’s Child, I had lost the business I loved, declared bankruptcy, started a new job, and had zero money. I was rebuilding my life, and my sense of who I thought I was, from the bottom up. I was still grieving my losses and deeply depressed, for a long time, but the community on journalspace rallied around me and lifted me up with comments on my blog and emails, and I will always be grateful for that space and those people.

When I was thinking about a new blog name, I was thinking about that blog and who I was at that time, during that life transition, and feeling like I would like to bring forward the best parts of that time, and that me, and start over. Version 2.0, (or 3, or 4 or 5.0,) maybe.

My life has changed dramatically in 23 years, and I’m grateful for that. The work and the people at ACME had a lot to do with it, as well as good friends, a good therapist, and anti-depressants, which I took for a time. I was struggling under the weight of essentially 2 full-time jobs at the end of 2023 (never let anyone tell you caregiving isn’t a full-time job), but now life is just soooo good in so many ways.

There are still lots of questions. Always have been, always will be, right? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Do I need to do anything? What matters to me? What seems fundamental? What have I learned? What have I let go of? What have I hung on to?

So here I am again. Friday’s Child again. Alive and well in Michigan, thinking about life and living it as fully as I can, day by day. What will happen in this new chapter? Or the next? There is always change, and I’m here for all of it, whatever it is, for as long as I can be.

Get. To. Work.

Yes!

I came across this quote yesterday in a book about writing. It struck me because it’s not only how I feel about writing, but also about life, in general. I’ve written here before about my desire to be of use in the world, an impetus behind my life I’ve recognized consciously for many years. For me, writing has often been a way of being of service, at least in my mind. That is my intention – for what I write to be of use to the people who read it. I have had a lot of blogs over the years, and my drive to write them has always been the same, to share my experience of life on this planet, in the hope that someone will benefit from it. I do the writing, and I figure it’s the Universe’s job to send people who need to read it.

Writing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was quite young, 2nd or 3rd grade, I remember trying to figure out how books were made, cuz I wanted to write actual books! I wrote story after story and taped or stapled the pages together, made covers out of cardboard, illustrated them, and agonized over just the right titles to go on those covers. I wrote scripts for puppet shows, and put them on for my playmates in the neighborhood. Admission price was a penny, but if you didn’t have a penny, that was okay. My goal was to entertain, not collect pennies. I’m not even sure why I chose to charge admission. I suspect that like making books with cardboard covers, charging admission made it seem real.

I wrote stories about EVERYTHING, and I read them to my dolls, the cat, and later the dog, who was a lot more attentive than the cat. Most have been lost, but I still have one about a priest who lost his faith, that I wrote when I was 11 or 12. I can’t imagine how I presumed to think that I had any idea what it was like to be an adult, let alone a priest, and how I ever came up with that idea is lost to me now.

I just loved to write. I loved stories. It was fun to make things up and write them down. I thought for sure I would grow up to be a successful writer, like P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy), who were my favorites, along with many others. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I wrote everything I could think of.

I still love and do both of those things, though time is limited now, and my taste in books has changed, although those are all still favorites. I have always thought of myself first and foremost as a writer, though that has not been the way I’ve made my living, except for a brief stint as a journalist many moons ago, which I didn’t enjoy very much. I didn’t stick with it, though the training was valuable.

Writing is simply the way I process life, the way I look at the world. I still love it like I did when I was a little kid. I’ve blogged, in one form or another, since the internet was text only, though in the beginning it wasn’t called blogging. Most of my writing online then was on news groups and bulletin boards. I’ve taken time off over the years, but for the most part of the last 30 years I was writing on a blog somewhere. I still write short stories, and poems, and I’ve knocked out large parts of several novels that never were finished for one reason or another. Writing has always been life for me – there is no separation.

So, having said all that, I also realized yesterday when I read that sentence, that I’ve been absent from this blog for a long time, and I haven’t been journaling or writing at all for too long. It’s time again to get to work. My life is complicated these last few years, and time is at a premium, but if I’m not writing, I’m not living.

It’s really that simple.

What work are you neglecting? What will cause you to get back to it? The world needs all of us now, doing whatever it is we were meant to do, playing whatever role toward healing this planet and our humanity you feel you were given. The best gift we can give to the universe right now is simply being true to ourselves. Trust your gut, and get back to it. You may or may not be paid for your important work, and you may not feel like it’s good enough. None of that matters. Find what you love and just do it. Whatever it is. Trust that the universe gave you that love for a reason and follow it through.

Be brave, and get back to work! It probably won’t make you rich and famous, but it just might make you happy, and that’s all that really matters. Let me know how it goes!