ThreeEight.ca

This blog is one year old. Happy Birthday, Blog.

Technically the blog's birthday is March 18, when I posted my first ramble. But the sentiment behind it is definitely a year old. The raison d'etre, if you like, for this blog is at its magical first birthday. Break out the champagne.

The blog was started four days after my last birthday, which was also somewhat memorable. On that birthday, I decided it was time to do something. Bluntly, I was miserable, and something had to give.

There are of course a whole bunch of reasons why I was miserable, and I had it all written out here. But in the end, I've thought better of publishing it. This isn't because I don't want people to hear the story, but rather because there are a lot of people who read this blog who were involved or observers to the situation, and there's no point in making any of them uncomfortable or hurt. My situation sucked, but it was mine alone to fix.

So let it suffice to say that I was in a bad place. Personally, I felt exhausted, drained and mentally beaten. Professionally I felt ineffective, untrusting and untrusted, completely out of place. And it sucked. I had always done well at jobs, always been respected, always got good reviews. And even if they hadn't always been the most fun or necessarily the coolest job in the world, I always did pretty ok at them. Not this one. It was a trainwreck.

This sucks.

At about 11 am on March 14, 2007, I quit my job. I told my boss the truth, the bottom line: I wasn't in the company or the place where I could be successful at whatever it was I was trying to do. I had to leave. I gave two months' notice; we negotiated three. At the end of that day, I went home and told my husband I had quit my job.

Honey, I'm unemployed. Sorry about that.

He was the least surprised person on the planet. He knew where I was professionally and personally. He knew I was miserable every single day. And he was just as sick of me being miserable as I was, frankly. We could afford for me to not work for a while, so that's what we decided I'd do.

With the whole wide world in front of me, I wasn't sure what to do next. I knew that I was going to be really good at something; I just had to find it. I'd always believed I'd write the great Canadian novel or turn into a freelance writer, but I had no idea where to start. I started investigating options, where I could write, what I could do, how I could do it, whether I had to start from scratch somewhere at age 37. Soon, on a total whim, I found and signed up for the BlogHer Business conference, not because it really had anything to do with the job I was leaving or any potential job I had lined up (cause there was none), but because I thought blogs were cool. And given the fact that the conference was called BlogHer Business, it sort of implied that people did this blogging thing for a living.

People get paid for this?

I used to blog, a long time ago, back in the 2000-2002 range. I had a fun little blog and a nice little audience. But back then, I didn't know how to handle internet non-anonymity. I didn't like that people that I knew - or people that I didn't know - could just find me and read things. When someone scary from my past found me, I decided that that was a situation I didn't want to deal with, so I took my blog down. Poof - it was gone. And that was it, for a really long time. I'd tried starting a new blog a few times, but it never really took.

You can't go to a blogging conference without a blog, fool.

Yet here I was, about to go to BlogHer. And my old blogs were beyond resurrection. So I started a new one. This one. I had no clue what to call it, so I went with the obvious: the age I was when I started this whole-life revolution. 37. ThreeSeven.

I started the blog to go to the conference, but I had a resolve: The point was, to just write. To find my voice. To create my own little stage, to hone my writing process, to see if I could write anything that anyone would read.

The conference blew me away. I saw people who had changed their lives just by starting to do something they loved. And I came home and I started blogging. A lot. Some days are more readable than others, but overall, I just kept writing. And I finished working, and I slept for three months straight, but when I was awake I kept writing. And I figured out what I was doing, and I analyzed and adsensed and technorati'd and dugg and wrote some more. And now here it is, a year later. I am working again, at a job I like, where I think I have a pretty good chance at succeeding at what it is I'm trying to do.. and lo and behond, one of the things I get paid to do, is blog.

Funny how sometimes, shit just works out.