Confessional.

Hi. My name is Robin2go and it’s been five months since my last confession.

I mean blogpost.

It’s not that things stopped happening to me last fall. If anything, my life was on the hectic side — almost careening out of control, much like the scene where Indiana Jones is running away from the boulder behind him, threatening to flatten him like piecrust under a rolling pin. Sometimes it’s all you can do to simply focus on the task at hand. Not like now, where I should totally be finishing my wireframes for this latest sprint at work. But instead, I’m throwing words on a page if only to exorcise them from my head. Because sometimes my personal priorities don’t exactly align with my professional priorities. But that’s the curse of being me.

If I had to be completely honest with you, I think I stopped writing because I was spent. I started blogging as a workplace exercise, writing about technologies I was exploring. When I left Penn State a couple of years ago, a funny thing happened to my writing. It moved away from the pedantic professional posts into something incredibly raw and personal. I wrote because I felt something, and passion is a powerful motivator. You, gentle readers, seemed to be highly approving of that, and I went with the flow because, for better or worse, this is often a collaborative process. You may get better blogposts but frankly, it’s exhausting to bare my soul that much. For someone who has played things close to her chest for most of her life, it takes a lot of trust to put it into the world; I think, quite simply, I had to walk away. It’s not difficult to see that I use writing as a catharsis of sorts; if I get the thoughts out of my head and down in print, I seem to process things more easily. There’s actually a lot of writing you haven’t seen — dozens of draft posts where I’m hashing out frustrations, or sorting my feelings, or railing against the machine where it would be less than ideal to do it in public. Sometimes I get 90% of all the outpourings on the page, but it’s not worth the last 10% of effort to caress the words into a meaningful post. I’ve already shot my wad, so to speak, and now I just want a nap.

However, it seems I’ve broken the surface tension and am swimming back to shore, ready to get back to the task of writing. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the last six months, because there really were a ton of things happening last fall — conferences, speaking engagements, new opportunities, missteps where I stuck my foot firmly in my mouth and then had to awkwardly extricate it (I’m trying to work on remembering to think first before opening said mouth, but it’s still a work in progress, that one). People left me, people came back into my life; a boy went to Afghanistan came back a very different man. Celebrations of birthdays, holidays, big events and small victories happened and were embraced. I gave up some things that were dear to me, and recommitted to a relationship with higher education, and with myself. So many things, and I promise to share them, both the professional and the personal. Just not today.

Today I am saying hello again and recommitting to our relationship. Thanks for sticking around.