While many of you likely have never even read my old blog, I want to at least explain to those who have followed me in the past why I’m no longer blogging at notsoliteral.com.
A little bit of background: I started blogging 12 years ago when I was 15 years old. Truth be told, it was because I went on vacation with my family and met a girl from Tom’s River, New Jersey and developed my first serious crush. We liked each other and decided to stay in touch through our old school AOL accounts with email and instant messager. At the time, I was an angsty teenager with a lot going on in my life in the way of family and personal issues and I really enjoyed writing. However, I was painfully shy about sharing my writing with people in fear that I’d be judged and laughed at for what I was going through. So, my new lady friend in New Jersey happened to have a livejournal.com account and was an angsty teenage writer as well. So, I took the plunge and created an anonymous account and wrote my heart out. I expressed and shared with my anonymous audience in ways that I had never opened up in real life with anyone. It felt great.
Moving forward over a decade, I always continuously blogged. I jumped from platform to platform, went from an anonymous pen name to my actual name and developed personally and professionally in ways a person from my background never could have otherwise. I literally shaped my network and my life through my blogging and social networking. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky that I stumbled into this world at a relatively young age and kept an open mind while people were considering that style of writing narcissistic and no more than an online diary.
This story takes a bit of a halt on Christmas Day, 2011 when I was at my girlfriend’s family’s house in West Virginia. I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to write a blog post about my holiday and reflect on the past year. I did my normal login routine and realized that my notsoliteral.com domain was directed to a place-holding page – the kind you see when I website domain has just been bought but nothing is built on it yet. I calmly grabbed my phone and called my domain hosting company GoDaddy.com to see if there was something wrong with their servers or something. After digging around for a couple of minutes, I got a customer associate on the line and was told coldly “you don’t own that domain anymore. A gentleman by the name of ________ in Texas bought it today.”
I was confused and began to panic. I asked about my account, how that could have happened and all of the relevant details regarding this transaction. I was told essentially that my domain name expired on Christmas Day and was bought immediately by a person who buys up domain names. I was confused because I had renewed all of my other domains that were expiring around that time of year and got no notice that notsoliteral.com was expiring.
My panic turned into sharp sadness in knowing that something went wrong and it was more or less my fault that I didn’t handle my business of keeping my domains active. I swallowed my feelings and commenced with the rest of my holiday festivities as best I could however, I knew that a major part of my life was missing, or maybe changing.
As 2012 began, I was starting my new consulting business and generally focusing my attention on financial matters. I kept getting told that I should make a new blog for myself and just start over. But, I didn’t want to start over. I’ve listened to my gut and I know, deep in my heart, that I don’t want to start all over again and try to create some linear continuation of what has existed for over 10 years. Basically, I want to feel like even though my blog doesn’t exist anymore for me to go back and look over it in retrospect, it still existed and at many points, created incredible opportunity for me. At the most, I met my current girlfriend through this blog and have gotten job offers that took me across the country to places I’d never seen before. At the very least, it was an outlet for me during the hardest times of my late teenage and early adult life. I’ve come to terms with the period of time that I spent sharing my feelings in that format.
Still, that doesn’t feel like a justified ending for me as a writer. I was born a writer at my core and will probably die that way. I may write blog posts for businesses I work for or as a guest columnist for publications, however, I want to channel my creative energy into another form. I was to write books, short stories and essays. There… I said it. I just placed a huge fucking boulder’s weight on my shoulder by saying that out loud.
I’m hoping all of the creative flexing I’ve done has benefited me in some ways. I hope it hasn’t given me incurable ADHD due to writing in short form most of the time too. Either way, this is the road I’m going down and only I can see where it leads and if I’ve got this ultimate vision’s execution in my DNA. I hope I have it in me.
I’ll be staying on my social networks for the most part. I’m not sure I could professionally pull off cutting out social media from my life (actually, I know it would be career suicide), so while I may pull back from some outlets, I’ll be interacting and networking still for the foreseeable future.
Okay, so now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ve got some work to do. Thanks for listening now and in the past! Hopefully I’ll have something good to share with you again some time in the future!
