There are things to say and many stories to write, but a lot of them, too, feel mechanical to me – a tone that seem to reflect my blog these days.
Yesterday, I asked friends to do a test-run of my new template following a huge dip (over half) in the readership post-installation. I wanted to be assured it wasn’t what I was doing, but maybe something technically relevant – in which case, I may be truly fucked.
Many of them said it’s probably the slow loading time. But some long-time readers also intimated that it’s because this space, once full of warm stories of mothering on the road, no longer possesses the spirit it used to have.
I am afraid they are right.
It’s dry spell season on this side of the writing earth. There’s creative juice left (though mostly hard-spent), but every tail end of the day, it’s sucked dry by the need – nay, urgent requirement – to survive: survive copies, survive the bills, survive deadlines, survive adulthood, survive parenting.
There is sparse desire to write more in the creative sense, but we breadwinner parents are always defeated by the time-tested fact of life that adulthood always comes first.
That’s the tragedy of writing as a career for you. You write to sustain a livelihood that often, you realize you’re not really writing to write. Creative writing – blogging included – is the lover that has to take a backseat, so you two can eat and thrive and see if the following day holds warm light and you can still be friends. Because the lover robs and demands time – time that translates to the next meal, the next pages, the to-morrow.
It feels that the only way to stop speculating about numbers and cease being frustrated at all this is to give up things that steal from you. Give up Facebook and social media. Give up overthinking. Give up blogging. There will always be space for travel stories elsewhere: in the interwebs, in print, in dreams as we sleep.
Blogging, right now, seems non-essential in the grander scheme of grown-up things. I’m exhausted of playing catch-up with matters of life; I don’t want to continue doing the same here to keep the blog alive.
There’s a trite metaphor for this feeling: one finger hooked at the edge of a crumbling rock, body dangling mid-air, uncertain why your finger’s even there when you can choose to just let go. But the straight and straight of it is; completely nonmetaphorical, truthful and bonkers at the same time: I am almost done blogging.
At this very low and dry moment, I think the reason, really, why this blog still exists is Lia. Only for her. For that tiny hope that someday, when I’m done playing grown up, we’d still have this – fleeting moments in our journeys storified – to come home to.
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