Why I Gave Up Blogging and Came Back Again

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Let me open by saying that I believe there are two main types of people in this world:

Those who are determined to do what they set out to do, and push through until it’s done. Aaaaaand…

Those who give up after a short time of not seeing (enough) results, and move on to the next thing.

And then there’s me, I fit into neither category, or maybe I’m somewhere in the middle. I like to think it’s eccentricity. I do pretty much everything different than your average person. I go against the grain, I swim against the stream and I typically do opposite of whatever the norm is. Now, I’ve been accused of doing this on purpose on more than one occasion. I hear things like “You’re just doing it this way because it’s different” from various people, some jokingly and other starkly serious. However, I personally feel like 99% of the time, that’s not the case.

Allow me to explain. It all started when I was about 8 years old. My mom, dad and I were driving down the road behind someone pulling a boat. The boat had a name printed on it, as most large vehicles do, although I can’t remember what it was now. However, I do clearly remember my father saying “If you had/were a boat, Kelly, your name would be Never Satisfied. And, I think it does ring true to some extent, nearly 25 years later.

It’s not that I’m never satisfied in the typical sense of the word though. I’m just seeking, searching, discovering. I think it’s important that we find our calling in life, and for some people it comes quicker than others. I’ve done everything from playing the flute to karate as a child, to working (for others and for myself) and being a stay-at-home-mom as an adult. I like to think that life is sort of like a puzzle. We find pieces that fit, sometimes after much trial and error, a little at a time. Once one piece fits in, you move on to the next, and sometimes you have to go back and fix/change something to move forward.

So, back to my original point, I don’t think that me giving up on things – after a fair attempt – is truly giving them up, it’s realizing that they aren’t the right fit, that maybe God has another plan for me. For some reason I keep coming back to writing, though. I’m not going to lie and say that I love the whole aspect of what today’s “Blogging” entails, because I don’t. Finding the right cover photo, selecting the best “key words”, trying to even fathom what SEO means and how I should be using it, and everything else that comes with promotion and attracting an audience turns. me. off!

I do love writing though. So perhaps blogging could work, if my writing makes up for my lack of desire to do the other work that today’s successful bloggers do. Maybe some other type of writing gig – a book author? freelance writer? article/advice columnist? – could suit me. I don’t know. But, until then, writing feels good. It’s a release of sorts, for my soul, and I think it’s good for me. It’s a way to express myself, and hopefully help others in some small way. Sometimes we have to treat this journey called life like a puzzle, fitting in one small piece at a time, until it comes together.

So for now, I’m back (again). I gave up last time after purchasing a domain, doing a bunch of boring research and blogging for a few months. I felt like I wasn’t making progress – ie: getting enough traffic/feedback from the community, and I lost motivation. But, as I’ve said earlier, I keep coming back to this. This will be my 4th attempt (that I can recall).

My first blog was over at Hubpages, and called Diary of a Mad White Waitress, it was during my stint working at Cracker Barrel, and included my raving and ranting about the food service industry (as I knew it) and waitressing in general. It was quite hilarious in my own eyes, but I didn’t promote it at all, and I didn’t give it any time to grow.

My second blog was named after one of my many businesses I attempt to start (selling baked goods at home), Seasoned with Love & Honesty, not sure where it was hosted or what happened to the site, but it was your typical food blog, a few paragraph opening about the back story of my delicious recipes, a blurb about my life tied in and then the recipe along with several really bad, low-lighting photographs of said food.

Thirdly, was a blog by the same name as this, but it was it’s own domain and ended with a dot com, so I thought since I was the real deal that it would work this time. I have actually attempted to recover my blog posts from that blog (it’s only been about a year since I canceled my domain host) and found that they weren’t saved by BlueHost or WordPress. I know – I should have backed them up – dummy, but I didn’t. So, I found that there are websites that actually store cached data from the internet, and you can access deleted content/webpages with varying degrees of completion. I am currently trying to use several of these websites (like the Wayback Machine) to retrieve my old posts so that I can include them in this – my fourth, and maybe final, blog.

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