I had a blog once. It’s still live, you can read it and come back here, if you like. If you cringe at what I’ve said in that blog, just know that I have also cringed while rereading it. I’m 37 years old now. My views have changed. So has the world. It’s March 22nd, 2021, we’re all in the throes of a global pandemic. That’s a whole other post, or ten. Reading through my old blog posts highlights what I already know. I’ve been repeating the same thought patterns, actions, and reactions, for over a decade now. I haven’t dealt with my high-functioning depression because I’ve been able to keep my carefully crafted walls up. Somehow, it’s harder to keep them intact when I’ve had barely any social interaction in a year. Actually, that’s exactly why the walls are crumbling, I’m out of practice.
I bet my views will change in another ten years. I haven’t been able to think about the future since March 17th, 2020. The big picture part of my brain can’t see past the current month. It’s a problem. Here I thought I’d save the pandemic blues for another post. There is no escaping it.
Why am I starting up another blog? Because I love writing. Being able to tell a story, my story, to other people who want to hear it? That fills my proverbial happiness cup. Is that narcissistic? It can’t all be bad because the world needs storytellers. Historians, especially. Hey, I’m just helping them out. I’ve kept journals and still do but I noticed a recurring pattern to my physical journal keeping. I only write in times of stress. This makes all of my journals sad, energy zapping relics from my past. It makes me seem like a joyless person. I am far from that. I also would never want anyone to read those, ever, so here we are. Welcome.
I want to be transparent with you, dear reader, on my intentions with this blog. I plan on adding affiliate links to some of my blog posts. I will eventually have ads on this blog too. The ads that you might see on my site now are actually powered by WordPress. I don’t make any money from them, WordPress does, because I haven’t paid for the pro version yet. I promise you that I will always preface any paid content with a disclaimer first. You can choose to digest that paid content or not. I would like to make a living wage using my online presence and digital content creation. I also want to be genuine and authentic in what I’m writing and putting out into the world. I thought long and hard on becoming an Amazon affiliate partner and have decided that it’s a necessary evil to succeed. Don’t tell them I said that. I’m giving serious thought to whether or not I want to allow retargeting ads on my site. I’ll write a blog post about that too someday.
My main topics will be my maternal family history in Canada, storytelling exploration, and my love for typography. I plan on writing one blog post a month on my family history. I’m unsure of what this will unearth, and I may stop if my family asks me to. I’m ninth generation Canadian and I think that makes me an ancestor of Canada’s settlers. The word “settler” isn’t as nasty as “colonizer”, but aren’t they interchangeable? Settlers and Colonizers are considered to some to be one and the same. Colonization created mass suffering for the Indigenous peoples that lived here before us. I want to explore what it means to be a settler-colonizer ancestor and how I fit in to today’s narrative. I might not like what I find but I feel a need to find it. My goal is to blog about everything else twice a week.
Leave me a comment with your thoughts and I will try my hardest to answer in a non-awkward way.
Living and working on the unceded Indigenous land belonging to the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Kwantlen, the Katzie, the Semiahmoo, and the Tsawwassen Nations.
Learn more about territory acknowledgments here. Find which territory you live in here.
