When I began blogging, it was an outlet for the thoughts swirling around my head. Back then, it was a safe place to vent about infertility, to write about family, to explore hopes and dreams. The first time I remember blogging as an outlet was at a family event early in the medicalized process of trying to conceive. I don’t know what set me off (an innocuous question about whether we were thinking about having kids, perhaps, or a pregnancy announcement from a friend) but I retreated to my new blog space to write. The words were the tears I was shedding, and spilling them on the internet seemed both safe and intensely logical. It was here, in a community of bloggers, that I sought an understanding ear, virtual hugs, people who got what I was going through.
The landscape of the blogosphere has changed drastically since 2005. Gone are the days of the mainstream media thinking blogger = male. In it’s place, according to those same media sources, is a catfight between mommybloggers, women branding themselves for pin money, and lots of trivial naval gazing. Gone too is the heydey of the so-called “Vagina Posse” – the strong, grounding voices at the center of the blossoming infertility blogworld. In its place is an Adoption/Infertility/Loss (ALI) blogroll of 2345 blogs broken down into 52 categories. (Hey, one for each week!)
I’m having a similar identity crisis in my head. Why blog? And why *this* blog? The jury is stil out on that one, but if I wait to figure out I may never post again. So I dip my toes in, slowly, as I try to find my blogging voice again. Trying, too, to weave back together the disparate strands of myself that have gotten scattered about. I am opening the door here to family, friends “IRL”, blogfriends, and more. We’ll see what comes of this.
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