At the beginning of September, Stephen and I took some time off for a quick vacation in the US to visit family and friends. The 10 day trip took us to St. Paul in Minneapolis and across the country to Seattle. We were super excited to attend the Minnesota State Fair again and indulge in some deep fried cheese curds (which Stephen has been dreaming about for the past 2 years) and deep fried pickles. I was also looking forward to visiting Seattle for the first time and catching up with friends who had moved there recently.

Usually before a trip, I try to queue up 1 blog post per week while I’m gone and often for the week after I’m back while I get back into routine. Before our last vacation I was consistently posting 2-3 posts a week. Lately though, I’ve been struggling to juggle the priorities of spending time with family, my day job, sleep, and giving myself enough down time to recharge.

Writing blog posts had always been an activity I loved and it kept me busy during the week while Stephen traveled for work. I prided myself in my consistent content quality and quantity, often sacrificing sleep during the week to write. Stephen stopped travelling in May and I quickly found my schedule changing. After a day at work, I much preferred spending my evening watching TV with him and getting to bed at a reasonable hour, instead of blogging late into the night.

I struggled with finding the motivation I used to have for blogging and beat myself up for slacking at creating content. My hobby started to feel like a relationship I no longer wanted to be in. It took my energy and time only to give back a lot of guilt.

It wasn’t until August that I became okay with bringing my post frequency down to once a week, halving my commitment and reducing my stress 100%. I wasn’t tied anymore to ridiculous deadlines I gave myself, I didn’t feel pressured anymore to constantly churn out word count. Writing became easier again.

I also learned to value my time more. I didn’t have to blog about every single event, restaurant or experience, only those that I wanted to share and remember. Writing became enjoyable again.

So before this vacation, I didn’t worry about building up a backlog of posts. Now that I’m back, the gap in my post history doesn’t bother me either, at one point this would’ve been unheard of. The time away actually was refreshing and now I itch to blog again, a feeling I haven’t felt in awhile.

Today, I’m not sure if I’ll ever get back to posting as often as I used to, but I’m hoping the posts that do make it will be worthwhile to read.