Ok, so it’s past the “new year” mark but as we’ve settled into married life I’ve thought about what my next big project would be and also reflected on how my life has changed over the years and I’ve decided I really want to focus on this blog as my project for 2017 so with that are some big changes.
I started this blog in 2009 as kinda of a documentation of a girl who never cared about football trying turn herself into a football fan and it quickly became much more than that. Over the almost eight year I’ve been writing this blog my life has changed A LOT and I blogged about most of it. This blog pretty much became a personal journal documenting my ups and downs and everything in between but as I’ve thought about the direction I want to go in I’ve realized those posts doesn’t really belong here and so I’ve taken them down.
I want to be completely honest about this rather than give any fuel for speculation so here’s my reasons straight from the source:
1. One thing I blogged about frequently was my dating life. It made sense – I was single and in my 20s for a large part of time while writing this blog. I wrote about good times and I wrote about not so good times. While for me it is interesting to go back and see how far I’ve come and I don’t feel shame or regret in the path that brought me to where I am now I also feel like those posts don’t belong in my life anymore. I feel like it’s a complicated emotion and hard to put down into words accurately but it’s not that I see getting married as wiping the slate clean on the person I was for the 32 years prior to getting married or a reinvention but at the same time I think it does mean focusing on the future journey rather than the past.
2. I’m also removing a lot of personal opinion posts. It’s not that I don’t have them and in fact I removed some posts on issues I am very passionate about but I’m going back to the idea that this isn’t the right place. Over the past few months I’ve done a lot of “clean up” on my Facebook friend list – rather than feel censored in what I can share I would rather just limit my audience. I can’t keep everyone from making a screen shot if I post something on facebook but I can hope that I’ve limited my friend list to those I would trust to not do so. I have no such control here on who views this blog and what they do with the information on it.
3. In reviewing my past posts I feel like I was kinda all over the place on what I blogged about and I want to have more focus to a few topics. I also really want this blog to be my creative outlet for my hobbies and interests rather than a dumping ground for whatever I’m feeling on a particular day.
Right now I’ve reviewed all my posts up until when Shaun and I started dating because I felt removing the more personal posts from that time period was the most important step. I’ll still be removing a few “off topic” posts from the past few years over the next week but the majority of the clean up has occurred. I realize most of you probably don’t care or didn’t notice but for anyone who did I just want to be honest about where I am and why I did this. Sorry if you’ve been “hate reading” over the years – you’re going to have to go someplace else for your entertainment.
I’m still tweaking what I want the final look to be so you may a see a few cosmetic changes over the next few weeks as well but moving forward you’ll see posts about fashion, beauty , planning, marriage and things to do. I hope that I will be creating interesting content and you’ll stick around but regardless thank you for joining me on the journey – it’s been an interesting ride and I’m excited about the future.
Love, Mandysue in Memphis
