Whenever people hear I have a blog, the first thing they ask is what I write about. The question makes sense. If you have carved out a niche in the online world to share your thoughts, surely they are arranged around a topic. When I answer the question, I often simply explain that the blog is about “thoughts on living in the here and now” because the ideas in my head do not line up very well in a neat little two-sentence explanation. So for those of you who would like to know more, here is the more than two sentence answer to what this blog is all about.
I have had other blogs before, one about travel and a very short-lived one about moving to Los Angeles. If you’d like to check them out you can see them here and here, respectively. In my scouring of the internet, I know that blogs are often arranged around topics, be it food or politics or a love of three-toed lizards. Often it feels like the more specific a blog is, the more it organizes around a topic and a group of people, and the synergy leads to a great collaborative space. Think gluten free girl or that one with mommy pictures that are scribbled out on napkins or something. I toyed with the idea of going super specific. I thought about narrowing my space on the interwebs to a discussion of my food issues or my life as a tutor or any other part of who I am, but it never felt right.
The more I thought about it, and the more my husband and I discussed and discussed and discussed it, the more I began to realize that for me, broader was probably better. With this blog I knew I wanted to create a space to capture my thoughts in one place, and I didn’t want these thoughts to have to be limited to one part of my life. Focused blogs are great, but for me, it just didn’t feel right.
But as we fleshed out what it was that I really wanted to consider in this space, I began to realize that it was the juxtaposition of what it is to be a human being in this very complicated, messy, modern space we all live. I wanted to dig down and in the midst of the complicated find the good in the middle of the lives we lead, knowing that even in the most difficult places, good lives. And then I realized that what I had thought was broad was actually quite focused indeed. I wanted to create a written space that focused on seeing both the good and the difficult in the human experience that is defined by our modern world.
Some of the things that brought me to this place were conversations about our interactions with technology, the pressure to live up to outside standards, media inconsistencies, the hurts and pain of being alive, and also the joys and pleasures of being a person. All of those are real and a place where each of us can come together in understanding more about ourselves and those around us, and it is there that I wanted to carve out my niche.
So here I am. There are hard things and there are beautiful things about the lives we lead. To honor one and ignore the other would be remiss, and I hope that this space becomes a place for all of us to engage about both, always in a way that leads to the real—the modern real.