I can’t believe it’s been more than four (!!) years since I last wrote in this blog. In the meantime, Blogger has apparently decided to get its act together and revamp its entire dashboard, allowing, for example, for custom templates, custom URLs (for free!), and all kinds of other goodies. I’d long since transferred my other blog, My Inner French Girl, from Blogger to WordPress precisely because I wanted the ease of use and customization options that that platform has always offered, but I never quite got around to switching this one over.

Not that I would have had much time to do it. I started a little social media and content marketing company called Blue Volcano Media (also on WordPress, natch), and before I knew it, I was/am working excruciatingly long hours and wondering how I managed to hit the big 4-oh without too much fuss. Anyone can launch a startup, but I can see why so many of the featured startup stars in Inc. and Entrepreneur are in their twenties — it takes a tremendous amount of physical, financial and emotional sacrifices to not only launch but also sustain and grow a startup, and I daresay that for most people, the twenties are when we are most likely to have these in abundance. By the time you hit your late thirties, you have families, mortgages, car payments, and a dispiriting number of friends who are far higher up the socioeconomic ladder than you are. Starting a new business isn’t just a big, terrifying leap into the unknown at that point — it can be downright insane.

So I jumped into the insanity.

It’s been a big, crazy ride, one that I’m still on, but I’ve also had to step back a little as I realize how much of my writing I’ve sacrificed as well. For a writer, financial and even physical sacrifices are painful, but sacrificing writing is heart-ripping. It unmoors you and leaves you feeling almost vulnerable, even fragile. When your identity has been wrapped so tightly and intimately with writing — the act of it, the thought of it, the very idea of it — not engaging in it for so long leaves an insidious sense of being unwell. Maybe that’s why I’ve often been sick the past four years.

Thus, returning to this blog is my attempt to heal myself. To return to what makes me whole and hope that all the pieces are still here, lying around waiting for me to put them back together again. For me, writing is more than an act of faith. It’s an act of hope and survival as well.