I think I started blogging about 12 years ago or a bit more. It was when blogging was still all about writing and connecting and inspiring one another and creating community. It was exciting and new(ish) and it was before anyone was thinking about “monetizing.” Ads on blogs were barely ever seen and Amazon was only just about to create the affiliate program. (I may be off on some of these dates but this was my perception when I started.)
Some of you may still be around from when I started and you’ll remember that I began blogging under BlissChick. For the first year, I blogged seven days a week without missing, and then I transitioned to 5 days a week and stuck with that for some time. I had daily topics … you know, MusicBliss, BookBliss, InterviewBliss… you get it.
Blogging got me to love writing again, and the conversations that could ensue, even on a smallish blog like mine, were invigorating. We were making friends all over this globe. I loved watching my stats and seeing where my readers were coming from.
Some of the friends I made in those days are still friends to this day. Those friendships have deepened. I’ve met many of them in person. I was right about who they were every time but one! Pretty amazing stats.
Connections online are no less real than in 3D life. If you have shallow relationships in person, you’ll get the same virtually. If you’re a deep relationship person, the same will happen here. As I like to say, it’s all about the user, not at all about the tech.
Blogging like this changed my damn life and that is not hyperbole. I went to my very first dance based training at Kripalu because I felt a healthy and helpful obligation to my readers/friends to whom I had announced my intentions.
I would NOT have the life I have now had it not been for blogging.
So when someone I knew from way back when, Mindy Tsonas, announced she was going to start blogging again in this “old” way, I was immediately on board.
We need this now more than ever.
At the beginning of this year, I decided 2020 would be my year of beauty. Creating it, cultivating it, curating it.
If that sounds at all trite to you, then you don’t know beauty. Beauty is truth, vulnerability, passion. It has very little to do with aesthetics though there’s also that. The aesthetics, if it is true beauty, though, will always point to those deeper things…be merely a signpost pointing to something much more important.
And that is what Mindy intends to focus on… that sort of beauty… the kind that, again, creates connections and helps us to inspire one another and to be inspired … to be inspired, most importantly, to something MORE.
Thanks to Mindy, then, I’ll be here much more often again. I might even be setting up daily categories of content. For old time’s sake.