Why did you start blogging? Part Two

Picking up where I left off last week:

I read two blogs for about a year. That was really all I made time for and they were enough to give me an escape from my day-to-day life. I did so miss the country. I never considered having my own blog at that time. Eventually I clicked on a link that led me to a female artist’s blog. JudithHeartsong Not only did I think her art was fun and whimsical but in that blog I found a strong woman who had left an abusive husband and now lived with her soul mate. My gaydar spiked, and yes, I was right. Now blogging was getting interesting I was starting to find my people.

She told her story of starting over and leaving her abusive past where it belonged. By then, I was thinking of having my own blog. I started a journal on AOL. I invited my family members and friends to view it. I found myself posting things like flowers in my yard. For a variety of reasons, I did not want to blog about my personal life. Maybe it was because I had connected it to my email address and I did not want to be so visible to people I had worked with. Nonetheless, my AOL blog was boring and thank God, AOL closed all their journals a couple of days ago.

Back to the artsy blog….One month she posted a contest, she was having so that her readers could share their creative minds. I did not enter as I do not consider myself an artist and certainly, I could not write like those who entered the contests. The next month, another contest, I did not enter , and so on until one day, she had a contest about vegetables (and if we considered tomatoes a vegetable, we could enter something artistic about them). OMG I had something to enter so I entered a clip I made that featured my cat, Digit and a tomato. To my surprise, I won.



I wish Judith would begin her contests again. They were fun to think about and read.

Here is my artsy award:

If I could figure out how to put it on the side I would display it proudly.

I began clicking on blog lists on each site I was reading and eventually I had found more of my people. Women who loved women and wrote about it, I was hooked on several sites and little by little, more fun blog reads were added. I am not sure if Pioneer Woman’s site lead me to Doc's Sunrise Rants or if I found Hahn at Homefirst but I love to read the everyday thoughts of these two women who are not afraid to speak their minds. I learned words like asshat and f*cktard from Doc. Even then, with my new vocabulary words I still did not start a blog. I was just about as depressed as one could get and reading the blogs was the highlight of my day.

Eventually I began reading BearsMountain. I remembered the struggle I had leaving my 14 year marriage and upsetting my son’s lives. I remembered how exciting my first relationship with a woman was. I was only 16, she was 17 and it was as if we found each other at the perfect times in our lives. Our relationship only lasted the summer between my junior and senior year (she went away to college) but I will never forget how much we needed each other that summer. We were both only children and we seemed to fill an emptiness that made us complete. More about this later…perhaps. It was a good summer.

Old Crone (BearsMountain) wrote something about how in real life she never had as many people that related to her as she did online. I could see from her comments that others were supporting her and the difficult decisions she is trying to make. I wish blogging were something that was available 40 years ago because I think it would have saved me a lot of pain, and just maybe, I would have been able to find more of my people. I felt so unsupported back then.

To be continued...