I’m Back!

Hello…it’s me…You heard me singing that in my Adele voice, right? Ok, cool. I know. I know. It’s been a long time, so I expect this message to reach your spam box. If it actually reached your inbox, I’m super grateful.

I can’t believe I’ve been M.I.A. since January. And I’ve been literally off the grid since March. You see, I forgot to pay the annual fee for my hosting package, and well, they shut me down. Lights out. Zero dark whatever you wanna call it. So if (and that’s a pretty big “if”) you happened to miss me or my sporadic posts and ventured here to look for me, you were greeted with nothing.

I let the site stay down for a while, while I contemplated the crossroads before me. Over the years, I’ve shared about my struggle with discipline and focus; my perfection paralysis that often keeps me from starting projects, and my inability to finish when I do start. Reality is today I still struggle with focus and still hoping to be more disciplined…eventually.  So while the site was down, I had to decide to either get up and try again or just let it all go.

A week from today marks my seven year blog anniversary. Yep, it’s hard for me to believe I’ve been doing this thing for seven years. When the site was down, I took time to reflect on the past few years. I started this space with no clear direction or goal other than to share my thoughts, feelings, joys, sorrows, growing pains, triumphs, failures and lessons learned – my life – as authentically and transparently as I could. By being completely me, my hope was that some woman out there (maybe even you) would find the courage to be completely you or, at the very least, find some  faith, some encouragement and a little bit of laughter to complement your daily life.

I haven’t done a stellar job. Instead, I got bogged down with trying to curate just the right content on just the right topics, because that’s what the “experts” say do, right? *Enter Perfection Paralysis.*

Some years ago, I worked for a gospel music record label. There I met a young songstress with dreams of making her mark in the music industry. I had a few opportunities to chat with her, and some of our chats included talk about the “independent artist” route. At the time, she was a young single mom, so that route for her would have been hard work, to say the least. But sometimes the rewards of a journey down the road less traveled are greater than one could imagine.

And that was just one of the messages I got during my time of “lights out” on the blog, but it was a pretty darn good one. All these years, I’ve been trying to find my voice, my style, my purpose for this site, but I’ve been chasing others’ paths to do so. My encouragement to that young lady way back then was probably to ask God for His plan and to follow His path. It may not look like someone else’s and may even appear to go rogue from the path everyone says is “the way.” But it will be the best for you. It seems in all my blogging years I’ve failed to take my own advice. I’ve failed to write posts when ideas came to mind, because I thought they’d be too corny, too simple or too transparent, which would make me too vulnerable. Maybe, just maybe that was the haphazard, unclear, adventurous, just enough light for the step you’re on, road less traveled I was supposed to take.

If you continue to hang out with me on the journey, I can’t promise what it will look like. But I guess that makes sense since my goal for this blog site now is to go rogue, and let the Lord lead me down the road less traveled.