Mommy, Where do Blogs go After they Die?

"She's Aliiiive!!!"

So my blog fell off the face of the earth last spring.  No one has heard from me or known where I’ve been.  How the heck did that happen, and why?

Looking back at my last post prior to my disappearing act, it paints a rosy picture of lots of positive, gradual changes happening in my life.  I don’t think I was being totally honest with myself about my frustration about not losing much weight during the first six months of blogging, not to mention my stress at work and feeling a bit overtaxed and under-energized.  I fully intended to keep blogging after I returned from a brief trip.  After coming back, I just didn’t feel like writing, so I didn’t.  I was distracted by work.  At the same time, I started feeling worse physically and actually gaining weight.  Somehow a month went by, then two.

Around that time (late spring) my allergist noticed I had an enlarged thyroid, which led to lots of testing and an eventual diagnosis of hypothyroidism and the start of medication.  Specifically, I have Hashimoto’s, which is the autoimmune form of hypothyroidism common in the U.S. that requires life-long medication, often has a gradual onset over many years, and includes super-fun symptoms such as weight gain, extreme fatigue, low mood, slowed thinking, and other metabolic symptoms.  I kept gaining weight throughout the fall (15 pounds all together—topping my max all-time weight by 10).   Blogging was the last thing on my mind; just a flicker of guilt when I would see my logo on my toolbar.  I was feeling like garbage and just trying to keep functioning.

These past several months have not been a total Black Hole of Despair; more like a Grey Hole of Blah.  There have been some excellent things, even some blog-worthy things.  I started learning to play guitar over the summer and taking lessons to keep me on track.  My playing still isn’t pretty, but it’s getting decent and I really enjoy having something else to do with my time.  I’ve had a great reunion with many grad school friends as a bridesmaid in one of my best friend’s weddings, and had a similarly good time at a family wedding. My husband and I took a backpacking course at a local outdoors club in the fall, which led to a number of fun backpacking and hiking trips, and some enduring friendships.  We realized we were very happy to reconnect with our inner granola-crunchers, and cannot wait to break out our shiny new gear and plan trips when it warms up this spring.

My energy and motivation to work on myself has really picked up over this past month especially. Incidentally—or perhaps not so incidentally—this coincides with my thyroid levels finally stabilizing.  Lately, there have been a lot of positive changes in my life that I’m really excited about, and along with them a desire to write again.  Plus, there’s the nagging reality of an incomplete project floating out there in cyberspace and in my brainspace.  So here I am.   Sorry I’ve been gone so long—I didn’t call, I didn’t write.

I am busier in my life than ever, so I am scaling back GUU to its fundamentals.  I am completing two “courses” that fit in line with the hodgepodge of healthy living and life routines that I am working on—I am calling these “Healthy Living 103” and “Authentic Living 101”.  Importantly for my schedule, I am only setting goals for my syllabi one month at a time so that I can focus on the things I really care about the most and check my tendency to over-commit (and want to hide).  Ain’t got a clue how often I will be posting, but  I am looking forward to being back.  Let the blogging commence!