If you read my post from yesterday, you know how much I love this whole blogging thing. The opportunity it provides me to reflect on small moments in my day. And then the conversation that follows. The “TOTALLY BEEN THERE, I FEEL YOU!” comments and the back-and-forth discussions that it can lead to. There’s something super validating about sharing information with a community of people that know what I’m going through. SpED teachers, people who work in schools, people who have ever felt uncomfortable in their bodies.

I like this space for so many reasons.

At the same time, I find that when I do have more free time to sit down and write all my thoughts out, I fall back into these habits I tried to put to rest a few years ago.

When I was blogging more consistently – almost daily (anyone remember all those “Confessions of a Bloggerholic” posts or “Things I’m Loving Thursday” posts?!) – I felt like there was so much pressure to get things out. Push “Publish” on new posts frequently. Sign up for scheduling apps that would post to your social media feeds often so that your pages were active even if you were chugging away in the classroom.

In an effort to learn more about how to navigate the behind-the-scenes of a blog, I found that I got sucked into how I could best monetize my blog, how I could focus on specific aspects of teaching and share affiliate links of products that I used. There were so many rules about the best times to post content. So many blogging groups where we supported one another in an effort to get our pages seen and shared.

It was all so much.

There were days when I felt like I couldn’t go to the gym with Ankur in the morning because I needed to finish a blog post before work so it would show up in peoples’ inboxes before they woke up in the morning.

There were days when I left Ankur to finish making breakfast in the kitchen so I could figure out how to add pictures to my blog post after WordPress decided to change up its layout.

This morning, I woke up around 6:30 and I caught myself in those familiar moments thinking to myself, “Well, you just wrote 3 blog posts in 3 days. You could sit down and write another. You know, so it can go out and be published and shared with the world before the day gets started?”

But then Ankur woke up and he sleepily walked into the kitchen and I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and sleep next to him for a little while longer.

And I guess what I’m trying to say is that blogging is good. Sharing is good.

It’s all good. Great even.

But it’s not so good when it interferes with your real life. The real people.

I will never NOT have this space. I enjoy it too much to ever stop writing. But I think that I have to continue shifting toward a more conscious use of it. Remind myself of the intention behind it and why I started it in the first place. It wasn’t so that I could push out new content and build a following. It was to share moments – if and when I got around to it.

But if I’m not allowing myself to live the moments as they happen because I’m too busy trying to document the moments? Well, I think that just means I’m doing it wrong.