Ever Evolving
I’ve been spending a bit of time archiving more posts on this here site of mine. Having posts separated out into categories has made it rather easy to just bulk edit and move them to private. I used to spend a fair amount of time re-reading old blog posts, mostly to link to in a new post I was working on, though it has been quite a while since I’ve spent any considerable amount of time here looking at anything I’ve written since late 2009 when I moved this site to WordPress. There were quite a few were trips down memory lane during the archiving and it was interesting to see just how much my life has changed since then.
It’s beyond time to reformat this place, to make it into something else. I did that once before with the moving of most of my pre-2009 writing to an archive hiding here on my site—I still peer back into that from time to time. Part of my struggle with writing these last five years has been this switch I felt was coming but couldn’t put a finger on. Not only with myself but the way the internet was moving. Honestly, 2020 broke my brain in many ways. The blogs and email I had been able to stay caught up on became impossible to manage. Finally, I started unsubscribing from newsletters that were remaining unread. I am still in the process of unsubscribing from things that end up piling up in my inbox despite really wanting to still keep up with some of these writers/folks/companies. It’s just too much, though. Blogging and the self-induced guilt from not reading all of those became easier when everyone else stopped blogging, too. Hey, less for me to read! Some of y’all are still writing daily and I look back at just how much I used to write here and wonder how I managed it. To be fair, much of it was rather frivolous and amounts to micro-blogging which now takes place on social media instead of websites. It all served a purpose, though.
I was wistful archiving some of the posts about Forest. He’s 12 now and would be annoyed with being written about on my blog in such an open way. I love looking at those baby, toddler, and little kid photos of him. Those years were so, so long and *poof* now we’re looking at a tween turning into a teen and I have no idea how that happened. Everything felt so hard back then and well, damn, if it doesn’t still feel hard now. Just a different hard.
As I said, 2020 broke a lot of things and here we are nearly 7 years later and I’m finally coming to terms with a lot of the changes from that era. I’m now 46 and in the throes of perimenopause which has only one phrase to describe it: fuck this shit. I received an ADHD diagnosis in mid-2025 and that has thrown me for a loop as I have tried to look at my life and see its footprints all over it. I mean, let’s extend that fuck this shit to it, too, while we’re at it. I’m still examining some stuff adjacent to that as well and…anyway, it’s been a rough few years figuring things out in my life. And that’s just the surface of what has really been going on.
All of that is one huge reason I’ve pulled away from here. I’ve been wanting to write but not write as openly as I had been. For someone who processes things by writing, not writing has been difficult to adjust to—and it isn’t like I wasn’t writing, but it just wasn’t being done publicly and so the two weren’t the same in my mind. That’s how I ended up on Substack with the nature writing. The audience was wider and the ability to basically re-create myself in a different form and format made it easier to jump in with new and targeted writing. I felt very stuck with this site, the baggage of what was written here pinning me into something I used to be. Of course, I’m still the same person but in a completely different era with new knowledge and a new understanding of the overall shape of My Self that continues to evolve.
I finished my hiking guidebook earlier this year and then spent a considerable amount of time working on edits and map revisions (the book is being formatted right now and then I get to do line edits…:|). That took a lot out of me and I was already worn thin. My capacity to do what I used to do has vanished and I’m still fumbling around trying to figure out what works and what is getting left behind. I lost the ability to sit down and read for many years but that has been returning this year in bits and pieces. I can’t tell you how delighted I am by this because reading has always been my first creative love! My TBR has outgrown our bookshelves and I have started making some piles in my closet for the ones I find at thrift and used book stores. I was organizing them the other night and just sitting amongst them was magnificent! Books! What a joy!
Releasing the past me so that current and future me can participate here seems like the only way to go at this point. I still feel in a weird place with writing more personal stuff and we’ll see how that goes in the future. I’ve debated turning this to a photo journal or even just a hiking/nature journal but don’t quite like that either. I think the only way forward is to turn off comments.
Once I have more information about my book, I’ll reformat further so that this is a good landing space for people looking me up as an author.
If you are still out there reading, thanks!
