Guest Post: Becoming a Blogging Pioneer

I’ve turned July over to Momcomm readers while I vacation, visit family and take a little break from blogging. This month’s guest posters were randomly selected and boy are they awesome! Stop by each Tuesday and Thursday and see who’s holding down the fort while I’m gone.

Today I welcome long-time Momcomm reader, Robin from Farewell, Stranger answering, “How did I get into blogging?” She found support in an unexpected place.

On January 1, 2011, I sat down and started a blog.

“What platform should I use?” I mused aloud.

“WordPress,” said my husband.

I already had the Twitter account, which I’d set up the night before, so I chose a URL and it was done.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Do any of us before we really dive head first into the blogosphere? I certainly didn’t. I thought was doing something pioneering and brave.

At that point, I had been struggling with postpartum depression for over two years. I didn’t know how to make it better, but I knew what I was doing wasn’t working and I figured writing about it couldn’t hurt. I had been pondering this for some time – vaguely, in the back of my head the way we do with ideas that seem great and scary and maybe. I could have journalled about it, but maybe I’m just a put-it-out-there sort of person. So that’s what I did, and on that particular New Year’s Day I put it out there in a move that felt like I was forging a new path.

I felt bold. I felt brave. I was going to write openly about postpartum depression the way no one else was doing. (Except they were, but more on that later.)

And then my boss found my Twitter account.

I had another Twitter persona at that time — a professional one I used for my communications career — and I had followed a few mom-related accounts on that one. I suspect my boss found the new, mom/PPD one because of a series of follows and unfollows and resulting tweets. I never actually asked, but it seems like the most logical explanation.

In any case, having your boss discover your plans for a brand new blog about PPD sounds like a bad thing. But his DM saying, “[That] is a good idea. You go,” was actually reassuring. He knew I was struggling and I figured if he thought it was a good idea perhaps I wasn’t totally crazy.

So I wrote my first post, which mentioned this somewhat bizarre circumstance, and admitted that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

What I soon realized, of course, is that I wasn’t the only one writing about PPD, and I certainly wasn’t the only one blogging about incredibly hard, personal stuff. But isn’t that the beauty of blogging? We quickly realize we are not alone.

But what I’m still proud of is that I begun this process of blogging about my hard, personal experience intentionally, and with a commitment to helping myself and maybe a few other people along the way. That’s evident from my first post. So while I may not have been a brave pioneer in the blogging world, it was a brave, pioneering move for me. And I think that’s all we can ask of ourselves when, through our blogs, we share a part of ourselves with the world.

Robin Farr is a woman, a writer, a wife, a runner, and a mom – chronologically, at least. She got mixed up philosophically during her struggle with postpartum depression but wrote her way out of it on her blog, Farewell, Stranger. The perspective she gained from that experience led her to a new motto: “Live the life you’re meant to.” She’s now working on doing just that.