Taking a Step Back, Filling the Well, and Letting Go

Greetings 12 Months of Lent readers—it’s been quiet a while, I know. My last post was at the end of July and I was at the airport in Las Vegas, heading to the pacific northwest for a dear friends wedding. I had intended to figure out my challenge for August during the week that we spent road tripping around the state of Oregon after the wedding, but then something happened…I just didn’t want to.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, I didn’t think it would be forever, I thought maybe I just needed a little break—but then it happened again the next month…and the month after that…and the month after that. I wasn’t really sure what it meant for the fate of the blog, so I resolved to just sit with it for a while and see how it played out.

That’s when I stumbled on a series of posts that were circling around the blogosphere about “Blogger Burnout” (mainly this one and this one), and after nodding my head in agreement through the entirety of both articles, I was pretty sure I had found my culprit. Five+ years of not only doing these challenges every month, but then writing about them too, had caught up with me. I was burnt out, and to quote the New York Times article, “I needed a little less online and a little more in life.”

Amen.

So that’s been my intention since I last wrote: less online, more in life. After so many years of constant output, I’ve been trying to take a step back and focus on “filling the well” rather than drawing from it. I’ve been taking a little respite from incessantly documenting my life and focusing more on living it, being fully present in it—and it’s been just what I needed.

So, that being said, at least for the time being anyway, I’m closing out the 12 Months of Lent chapter in my life. Not sure if it’s forever or if it’s just for now, but I don’t think the commitment and rigidity of adding a monthly challenge to my already jam-packed mix is serving me in the way that it once did. Rachel Brathen, aka, “Yoga Girl”, wrote this in a recent blog post:

“Sometimes we let go of things or people just to find them back in our lives a while later, but with a different energy. Sometimes letting go means finding something different, of more value, along the way. Sometimes letting go means realizing you weren’t even holding on in the first place. But, most of the time…Letting go just means choosing to be free.”

So thank you all for the memories, for the support, and for following my journey over the past 6 years. I had no idea when I started this blog back in 2009 what I would have learned from it and where it would have taken me, but it’s been a pretty amazing experience to say the least, and one that I can’t imagine my life without.

With love and gratitude,

-Danne

p.s. I do think I’ll continue to blog, because one of the many things 12MOL taught me was that I love to write. I’m not sure where and in what format yet, but I’ll be sure to post on here once I’ve got my next blogging adventure in motion.