A blog, again

From 2004 to 2012 I kept a blog, Half Changed World, where I posted about “work, parenthood, gender, politics, and the rest of life.” It was never a “top tier” blog, and it didn’t make me famous or bring in lots of money. But it brought me in contact with some amazing people, some of whom are still part of my life. It’s hard to describe to folks who weren’t part of that world how amazing it was to be able to sit at the computer and be part of a real community, to wrestle with ideas and post a blog, knowing that people would read it, and post comments, or respond on their blogs. Many of us had small children, and little free time, but blogging let us be a part of an ongoing conversation, like the late night conversations I missed from college, fit into the nooks and crannies of our lives.

Did Facebook kill blogging, or the rise of influencers, or something else? I don’t know. But things move in cycles, and newsletters have become hot. I had a TinyLetter newsletter for a while, but I didn’t keep it up, and I somehow missed the news that they were shutting down, and by the time I went back to try to revive it, my archives were gone, lost forever, as was my subscriber list. A lesson in the value of owning your own content, of POSSE, of writing a newsletter not a “substack“.

At the end of September, I left my job at an organization where I had worked for the past 18 years. Much of what I’ve written in the past decade is available on their website. I’m not sure what’s coming next for me professionally, and I’m no longer in the throes of daily caring for children. But I do know that I still want to be part of conversations about gender and caregiving and what counts as work and what doesn’t, about politics and policy, and money and health and books, and why we are still having these same damn conversations and how does change happen. So here I am.