One year on Typepad and I haven't jumped ship. I started a blog at the beginning of March, 2006 on one of those, erm, sites that shall remained unmentioned (msn, cough) at the prompting of RW who said he wanted to read what I wrote, and so I did and I made it very, very public. You know, with my whole name and everything. And then last December I googled my name and came up with a video of Jeffrey and I singing the Lumberjack song and decided I needed to get a grip. And I came here.
Until I came here I did not belong to a blog community. I didn't even know what a blog community was. I've learned a lot in the last twelve months. I don't much care to hide my identity (not that I go to great lengths) but I do understand it. I learned what it means to be 'dooced' this year, to lose one's job over one's blog. I don't have any intention of losing my job over my blog but that's a good part of the reason for making sure a google search doesn't turn up much. I also learned that a lot of moms put a lot of pictures of their kids on the internet with a lot of information and that this is a scary thing for me. I don't have an opinion on what others do, I just know I fall somewhere in the middle of the road and that I don't ever post anything about Cletus without letting her know I did it. Little Girl doesn't quite get it yet, but she will and at some point she might object and then I'm going to have to quit it.
I like it though, a lot.
I don't make friends easily. Mostly I like to say I don't like people but that's not true at all, I actually love and adore most people; other people scare the crap out of me and there are very, very few people I actively dislike. What I don't like is the messiness and complication of relationship. That's just because I don't have any skin and well, that's my problem. I find it easier to be with people here. I find it easier the same way I love to chat with my mom via email during the day. It's easier for me to step back and think and nobody can see me scrunching up my face and trying not to show the world every bleeding feeling and thought I've got. I don't like that so much. Some mornings I dread looking at what I posted the night before but pretty much, it's been all right.
In any event, I like it here a lot. I like my blog community and I really like that I have this space.
One other thought for the night. I started a new career entirely by accident within weeks of starting my first blog. I started on this path because my good friend Jeffrey dragged me in by the ear and said, "it's time to go back to work, Heather." I did not want to go. I wanted to take a whole bunch of time off, write a book, be with my kids, think about my life and work out what's next. Instead I went into this company to work what I thought might be four to five days per month and would give me darn near close to what I was making in salary at the last start up and well, I stayed.
I stayed because I was deeply intrigued by this particular corporate culture and attracted to databases like some junkie cat strung out on dried up catnip from a dwindling stash. I stayed sometimes because I wanted to leave so badly I just would not let myself quit. I stayed because each time I took stock I found I was changing, even if it meant just relearning some lost humility. And today I got something back I haven't had since 1998 at the Software factory at my first review after I'd spent a year turning myself inside out to be the best darn trainer/writer they'd ever seen.
Today I got a 6% raise. In some worlds that is completely meaningless. In my world, in my past, it might have been marginally meaningless. In this world of reinvention and belt tightening it means two things:
- I did a bang up job in a field where I went back to just about square one and completely reinvented myself.
- I have inherent value in a place where nothing is given for anything less than, well, a really bang up job.
I got to go back to the beginning. I didn't even really know it when I started. I got a second chance at that feeling I had, and maybe a good many of us have had, when we are new and young and green and there is nowhere to go but up.
God, it was a good year. Thanks for being here.


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