I have been home from the hospital for 10 whole days now—all the while looking for things to occupy my time. I've started a handful of posts, but they all get too serious and heavy, so I leave the drafts to think about later when I'm feeling light again. That's been my pattern for quite some time now. There's one out there from March titled Procrastination. I don't remember what it's about, and I always mean to click on it to figure out what I was trying to spit out…but inevitably I put it off for another time.

Self-fulfilling prophecy right there, my friends!

My blog turned seven years old last month. I've been more reluctant to publish in the last few years, but I love that my life has been chronicled from innocent goofiness, to loss, to illness, to aloofness. It's an eloquent sequence that I could not have captured in one place because I needed my voice to change in the process.

Of all the gems of wisdom my mother shared with me, one echoes in my head more than others: everybody has a story. I like thinking about the stories, thinking of myself in those stories, and examining how I would feel if they were my stories. Along the way, I landed in my own.

I started blogging to keep in touch with family. At the time, I had been living 1,200 miles from home. The early stuff is very rough, and I am embarrassed just reading those entries…but they were geared toward a specific audience who wanted to feel like they were part of my day-to-day life. It was an inane, one-sided conversation.

I also remember struggling with what I could write that wouldn't offend anybody ever. The heavy censorship I placed on myself crippled me for awhile. I got over that fear with time. I don't think I'm particularly offensive anyway, but I'm such a little goody two-shoes—seriously, it's sickening.

As I said, eventually I got over the fear of stating that I think low carb diets are ridiculous and that I didn't particularly care for meat. Sorry if you were offended. (Go ahead, roll your eyes.) I had just been through a major transformation while living so far away from my family, and diet and clean living was/is something of a major fascination for me. I lived and breathed macronutrients and micronutrients. I ate that stuff up—pun most certainly intended. I had a lot of silly opinions that were very important at the time.

The first year of blogging was a very manual process. The site was a simple, hard-coded, static page. At the end of every month, I would save the index file with a unique file name, then save the blank copy of the index file so I could start writing for the next month (that's back when I published something every single month—usually multiple times each month…total Bizzaro World, right?). Then I went in and edited the archive page to add the latest month. Wow, I am exhausted just typing all that out. I had a picture page then, too. I suppose it was my Facebook page before Facebook existed—I like taking pictures, but pictures aren't very important now that I'm living close to home again (so they're gone).

Ooh, but I got a new haircut and low lights yesterday! (Ignore the paleness. See first paragraph: had major surgery less than two weeks ago.)

In 2005, I had enough with all of the hard-coding and the blog was switched over to a software that would store all entries to a database for archival automatically. At the time, I was married to a PHP/MySQL programmer, and the decision to use an open source software was a no-brainer. I even had someone in my pocket to install Serendipity for me!

Blogging is so easy today. I think, when I am old and gray, I will say that one of the greatest developments that I have seen over the span of my lifetime was the explosion of social media. Once upon a time, a person actually had to buy a domain and know HTML at the very least. Now, sites offer blogging profiles as an assumed service free-of-charge. I am excited that so many more people have the opportunity to be heard. Guys, that's pretty damn cool.

I don't think I write to be heard…not at the forefront anyway. I write to salve hurts, to take a photograph with words, and to remember all the charming little moments of life that are so easily forgotten when things get rough. By the end of 2005, the tone of my writing changed.

But then, the tone of my life had changed as well. I bled across the keyboard of my laptop for most of 2006.

That's not to say that there were not happy moments (there were many). Quite simply, my life had new dimensions that I needed to explore. I was feeling more than I ever cared to, and I had to clean out my wounds before they would heal properly (they have).

And what's left of the rubble in that procrastination draft? I miss writing. I miss looking for the entertaining parts of my day that I can "embellish" into a feature-length story.

I say that I started this blog for family, but really I started it for my mother because she missed me terribly. For the longest time, she was my only reader. Then she found it humorous enough that she spread the word. I think that's been part of my hang up: who is left to read now that Mom is gone?

I am always surprised when someone comments on a post because I don't know why anyone would hang around here when I have been so inconsistent. I stopped looking at website traffic eons ago…but apparently some of you are still out there. Thank you for caring enough to share my life and stop by for a visit now and then. I think I've got more family out there than I realize.

One of these days, I really will take a look at that Procrastination draft. Maybe tomorrow. More to come…