Moving Back

(pictured: where I first started writing Soberbia)

 It's funny how I loved writing this blog so much, and then as life got different, I got things like a my own website and I left Blogger to move on. I wrote on my website on Wordpress for a while, but it felt confusing and flat. Now all of those posts are gone, deleted by Wordpress without me seeing their look out warning. I started to blog on my current website but that didn't feel right either. 

Thankfully, these early years are still saved here. I started thinking about jumping on the Substack bandwagon, made a Soberbia page there, and yet...every time I wrote something it remained a draft and now there are 10 or so and it just doesn't feel like me. So I just leave my writing hanging in the draft space in Pages or on Substack and in my mind I keep promising myself to publish something, anything, for gods sake. 

But alas. Months go by, years..and nothing. No publish. 

Then on a call with a potential client the other day they told me they'd read this blog. And my old blog before this blog. I'd forgotten there even was a blog before Soberbia, but there was and it was called Sell the Goat. 

When I started Soberbia my method used to be: get up at 5 am. Sit at the computer desk next to the fireplace and hope no small children wake up early. Start writing, or find a picture that says what I'm trying to say and build on that. Be as honest as possible. Don't overthink it. Just write and publish and write and publish again and again, learning and living my way into some answers. Words are the flashlights for me. Scour the landscape and find the thing that needs light, writing is a lighthouse. 

It feels real and right to sit here, now, in a totally different life, nine years later, to return to write for the deep deep pleasure of writing writing. That it's a way to connect, to be in community, to build real relationships, and to offer what I know and to learn from others. I left Blogger when I decided my writing needed to look important, and be more legitimate, and got on social media and promptly killed my love of writing words with the soggy blanket of comparison and shiny expectation. It's interesting, I did that with my running too- made it complicated with times and miles and achievements and appearance and then let go of all of it and found the deep deep pleasure of running again. 

Maybe it's because I'm 50 now that I value my experience of my life more than I value the experience others have of my life. Maybe it's humility, or freedom, or the heart of dedication to my art- my beloved and temperamental writing- that beats steady and loud in my ears. 

Or maybe it's just that somehow we always manage to find our way home...