In the past year, I've travelled to Istanbul countless times, cooked and baked some amazing food, drank Guiness in Ireland with my in-laws, spent a raucuous weekend in Bodrum with friends, visited London for the first time with my best friend, celebrated my 30th birthday in Paris, and on and on.
I wanted to tell you about it, all of it, and yet I didn't. I wasn't on hiatus from writing exactly, but on a long -- okay, very long -- hiatus from this blog, from this space, which I had been feeling for a long time no longer reflected the life I was leading.
The second reason I didn't write on the blog very much was because the last year has not been the easiest of my life, and I wasn't sure how much of myself I wanted to put out here. I wanted to hole up inside, bake brownies and pretend that nothing was wrong. But I couldn't bring myself to pretend that nothing was wrong here, to all of you, because I knew it wasn't true and somehow that didn't seem fair.
The problem was that I didn't know how to say what I wanted to say. A lot of what I wanted to say didn't seem to fit here, didn't fit in with previous stories and posts, and I was stymied by what I thought you all came here for and what you wanted to read. And so I didn't say anything.
To be honest, for a long time, that was liberating. To not consider every meal, every event, a story or a post or something I had to share. And since I figured you all came here for restaurant reviews and pithy stories about street cats, I figured I couldn't write about the pubs in Galway or birthday cocktails at Harry's New York Bar because....that's not what this space is supposed to be about.
But this morning I woke up and realized that in not writing anything, anything at all, that I am wasting this space as a forum for writing and thinking and musing and that I was throwing away five years of online living just because I didn't know what I wanted to say right here and right now.
And honestly, I still don't exactly know what I'm going to say here. This space I'm in now is fluid and flexible and a little bit confusing, but part of me is hoping that I'll figure a few things out here, on this blog, where I'll just write what I feel and what I want and the rest be damned.
