Going on hiatus for a while

I’m going to stop writing blog posts for a while, especially about relationships and self-improvement and that sort of thing.

This pains me, as I’ve seen people respond positively both in comments here, in e-mails, and on social media.  It sucks for me personally, as I’ll often realize further things about myself and ways I can further improve while actually writing the posts.

But I have to stop, at least for a while.

It’s important to know how I typically write posts for the blog.

I write them in fits and spurts – for example, the posts in May were pretty much all written one weekend in April. In some cases, the ideas for the posts were floating around longer than that, and I’d just not gotten around to writing it. 

Sometimes I’ll dash off an immediately relevant post – like the one about inviting dictators over for tea, or how we already have the worst form of socialized medicine – and I’ll bump the rest of the posts even further down the queue.

I can also say that most of the posts in May were directly inspired by my own screwups, failings, and realizations as I overcame my own mistakes.  And in the cases where they weren’t, they were completely covered by my artistic license – something I made sure to occasionally point out.  (In short – if you recognized yourself in a post and I didn’t name you, I was talking about someone else.)

Despite this, it’s come to my attention that to some, it’s seemed like I was aiming my posts at a specific individual. 

They weren’t. 

Regardless, a number of people whose opinions matter to me believe this, even when I’ve (privately) shared the reasons and inspirations for why I wrote the posts that went up this month, or pointed out that I wrote them before the events that they were supposed to be in response to.

And it’s costing me in my own personal life.

If you’ve found resonance in the posts I’ve written, or meaning, or clarity, or a point of view that made you stop and think, I’m glad. That was the purpose for writing them here.  If you’ve found yourself uncomfortably reminded of yourself, you’re welcome to ask me directly if I was talking about you.

But I wasn’t.

Because I know others have gained value from these posts, I’m not going to take them down.  Maybe I was naive to think that writing things weeks ahead of time or publicly making a point of obfuscating details would be enough to keep people from getting upset and think I was writing about them. I hope that me writing this publicly is enough for those who’ve thought I was writing about them to think differently.

Regardless, I’m going to take a break for a while. 

Have a good one.