So I’m feeling pretty rubbish, I think everyone at my work is. We are exhausted not just because of work but life too (for a lot of us). I had something happen today that usually I’d write about. But over the last few years I’ve found myself blogging less and less. Gone are the days when all my friends were blogging about just everyday life. When we would comment on each others posts, when meeting for the first time was no big deal because in fact we knew so much about each other already.
It was very easy to go from a social media friendship to an in-real-life friendship with Emily and Mark, Ruth, Rebecca, Paula, Holly, Jeff and Christine, Sarah and Lee…and many others.
Many of those people don’t blog anymore. And today as I was sitting at home, snuggled in bed exhausted and aimlessly scrolling through my feedly, I came across Callie’s post on “Old fashioned blogging“. Callie is one of Rebecca’s blog friends and been a regular Airmail Christmas participant. But today she just hit the nail on the head. I miss blogs being just about life. Real, authentic life. Nothing polished. No need for perfect professional photographs. No constant sponsored reviews of products or services. Not a place to practice for a book or promote a ministry.
I miss the days when I heard about my friend’s struggles putting Christmas duvets on her kids’ beds. Or when my response to the problem by videoing how I put a duvet cover on a duvet led to a whole bunch of people reading a Christmas poem so we had a range of accents (because my American friends found my Scottish accent so funny). I miss the days when I was hearing about a silly thing that happened when my friend was on her way to university. Or the struggles of parenting and debt. A friend’s passion for photography and why they loved it. The ponders of the political, the ethical, and the evolution of beliefs and opinions that were ever-changing and ever-challenged by new experiences, different thoughts and conversations with people from a variety of cultures. There was always a lovely mixture of the mundane, funny and sharing stories that had deep wounds. And smiling, crying, laughing and empathising….together.
There was so much beauty in the blog community, before it got overtaken by capitalism.
Is it possible to ever reclaim that?
Can we ever go back to Old Fashioned Blogging?
I really miss it.
Not just writing my own life in blog form, but reading everyone else’s, and feeling like you were not just a stranger, but a friend.
From The Koala Tree 