I’ve never been very good at posing.
Like many others, I wear my heart on my sleeve. Even people with the emotional radar of a doormat pick up on when I say I’m fine but am lying through my teeth, or when the smile and usually bubbly demeanor seem strained.
The last months have required a lot of posing on my part. Life just hasn’t been as awesome as it usually is for a variety of different reasons that I didn’t feel comfortable discussing openly with family or friends, much less putting out in the blogosphere for strangers, professional contacts, and God knows who else to read. (Let’s just call Spring of 2012 “The Perfect Storm” and leave it at that.) But after a long day of pretending everything was rocking as usual for the benefit of those around me, the last thing I wanted to do was to come home and write a blog post about this awesome new restaurant I tried or this sweet dessert I just baked or other “wow, my exciting life in San Francisco is the raddest!” type of fodder that often invades my place on the web here.
And when I write that stuff, it’s true. I’m an honest person, whether it is with my friends, my colleagues, or my internet persona—I just have, necessarily, more of a filter. But I got to the point where I felt like I was lying to everyone around me and the last thing I wanted to do was perpetuate the everything’s-rosy mentality on the internet when I was often sitting at home and NOT feeling that way, exactly. There is a lot of value in concepts such as “choose your attitude” or “fake it til you make it” but when it gets to the point where it seems you’re lying to yourself, it doesn’t feel right.
So I stopped blogging. That’s the real reason. It’s not that I was too busy—I’m always too busy, but there’s also always time for the things that are more important. I stopped blogging because I didn’t want to LOL and 
and tell funny witty vignettes about my super-duper life when I was kind of going through a rough patch. Which we all do, at different times, and that’s fine—they pass.
But then I realized today that I was very much at risk of losing this blog forever. This blog has gone through seasons of life with me, from a hut in Africa to meandering through Southeast Asia to moving home to Granite Bay and wondering what to do with my life to a new world in San Francisco. There have been times I’ve been posting frequently, other times less so. There have been fun posts and insightful posts and stressed out posts and everything in between. Life isn’t perfect and there are seasons for everything. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don’t. But the answer is not to hide under a rock during those times and pretend they’re going to pass without casualty. Life’s rockier and more uncertain patches are a gift that give us the opportunity for learning, for growth, and for reflection, and make those sweet times and perfect moments that much more meaningful.
I won’t lie and say everything has been worked out yet, but I will be honest and say that I’m working on those things. Life will always have its complications, and the important thing is to focus on the joys, blessings, and love that we all have in our lives—sometimes you just have to look a little harder to see them.
I won’t let P&P die. There may be times I don’t want to log on and don’t want to share, and other times I do. But this blog has been an extension of me, and I need to hold on to these hobbies that I love and that bring me joy, if only on a small piece of the interwebs. And at the end of the day, life really is super-duper awesome.
For anyone who is actually reading this post, thanks for not forgetting about me. This time, I’m really back, bit by bit.
(see “one mile to go” photo for evidence)
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