I Needed A Change

Day One -- NaBloPoMo

Shall I launch this today, the first day of NaBloPoMo? I had honestly forgotten that it's National Blog Posting Month until I saw it in my memories on Facebook.  The post below has been a draft in this "new" blog since August 4 of this year!! I've been planning pages for this blog and composing posts in my head since then but have hesitated to actually begin posting. I guess this is as good a time as any to begin.  My work schedule has actually cleared up enough that I can't use that as an excuse not to blog, so I guess here it is, an introduction to a new Dusty Pages. I'll try to go visit a few of my favorite blogs of old each day this month and try out some new-to-me blogs as well to support other bloggers, and we'll see if I still have the motivation and mental capacity to blog every day for a month.

The draft I began on August 4, 2019:

I've been mourning my blog Dusty Pages. I've been mourning it for a while now.

After AOL shut down our journals and we moved to Blogger I blogged less, but it has been very significantly less in the past four years or so. 

Reasons for this are numerous: Facebook, getting older, and kids having grown up so that my "normal" changed are chief among these. Other reasons are an increase in depressive episodes and working outside of the home again. Lately I have WANTED to blog. Making the time to do it and feeling like I had the mental capacity to do it have kept me from actually doing it when the spirit moved me, but you know what? When I'd start to make a post I'd find myself getting anxious and freezing up. Well, there is no joy in doing something if you're anxious or freezing up, so I just didn't even let myself start a post. Just checked, and I have forty-four (FORTY-FOUR!) drafted but never published posts on Dusty Pages! That's ridiculous! And yet at times during a typical day I'll find myself thinking, "I should blog about that!" So the desire is still there.

So I'm beginning a new blog to represent my new normal. Maybe I'll find joy here, writing for myself, rambling when I want to ramble. I'll share, and I'll invite any of my old blogging friends to join me if they'd like, but it's ok if they don't. We mostly keep up with each other on Facebook anyway.  

My brother died on Saturday, the first of the seven of us to go. That was the impetus for me to start this blog. I wanted to incorporate different pages into my old blog where I could compartmentalize a few specific subjects that I wanted to write about and keep separate from each other, but I never did. So I'll do it here. The old blog began when my kids were very young. It is no longer the right blog for me to keep up-to-date. I might re-post or quote from old Dusty Pages posts when appropriate, but this is a new blog for a new day. 

So much has happened in the past two years that I never dwelled on or wrote about the way I wanted to in the old blog, and the more time went on the more impossible it seemed to go back to re-cap and share those things. So I'll share here. It might be willy-nilly, totally out of order, but that's ok. I'll write the way I used to when I first started journaling; writing about what I want to write about at the time instead of just trying to write a "catch-up" for anyone who may be reading. 

I briefly toyed with the idea of using Word Press. I've tried that before, but it just isn't easy and comfortable for me. If I were out to blog to make money, perhaps I'd put forth the effort to use it, but I just really don't like it. So I'll stay here, for now at least. It might take me a few days to relearn how to set up separate tabs or pages or whatever, but I'll get it eventually.

If you already know me, thanks for stopping by and I'll try to visit your blog soon! And if you don't already know me, well, welcome to my mess and hope you'll come back again! Leave me a link to your blog and I promise I'll drop by.  

Ta for now! ~~ Lori