Welcome to the next iteration of my online blog, known as Novenas & Novellas!
This is the second launch of this blog, as the first one didn’t quite work out; I took the wrong tactic. That’s why I took so long on this launch. I wanted to get it right this time.
I began blogging before knowing what it was, when I set up a LiveJournal account back in 2002. At that point I’d already had a personal web site for a while, as I’d initially set up an Angelfire page for a class assignment in 1997. But it wasn’t until the advent of my LiveJournal account that I updated my online presence with any sort of regularity.
It turned out that not only did I have a lot to say, but people also wanted to hear it. By late 2003, I’d already purchased my first domain name and was blogging on a regular basis. This predated today’s common advice to choose a niche for a blog, so I didn’t. However, over time my posts naturally began to coalesce around two main topics: employee benefits and Catholicism. One was what I did for a living; the other heavily informed my outlook and opinions about life in general.
At the time I started blogging, there was a third part of my online life as well, but since the general opinion about participation in media fandom — and my particular hobby of writing fan fiction — was pretty negative, I was careful to only mention that in the most oblique of fashions, if at all, in any place that I thought the general public might be able to connect back to me.
Over time, my priorities and my life changed, and I had fallen away from blogging regularly by the time I moved from North Carolina to Georgia in 2006. Part of this was because I had gone through my first burnout in the employee benefits field; part of it was because of a work schedule that had become more demanding; and part of it was because I had begun to seriously consider (and pursue) turning my photography hobby into a career.
But a big part of it was because my online presence was, in a relative sense, starting to contract. The vast proliferation of sites and experts concerning every field diluted everyone’s readership, including mine. In addition, I had begun spending a lot more time writing creatively, with nearly all of that work done in the fan fiction world. Moving to the Atlanta metro, with its thriving “geek” and media fandom cultures, meant a steady increase in that amount of time as well.
Since then, I’ve tried to restart a handful of times using more up-to-date blogging technology and using the newer forms of advice. It didn’t always “take,” not so much because I wasn’t interested, but because I frequently didn’t have time to write. In addition, I was working in digital marketing which meant entire days spent in front of a computer; my motivation to spend my leisure time in the same activity had gone down.
It wasn’t until a rather abrupt end to that career field in 2011, that I figured out how to intentionally create writing time for myself. And it wasn’t until my return to benefits work — on the broker side, this time — that I began even being interested in employee benefits again.
By then, of course, the ACA had been passed, and as I began to dip my toes back in, I was stunned to encounter the reactions. Everyone had suddenly become a health insurance “expert” overnight, and nobody had a balanced opinion of it. It seemed as though you either had to support it in its entirety, or you had to denounce it as an attempted socialist takeover.
My position on the ACA has always been more complicated than that, but I was effectively shouted down every time I tried to articulate it. After a while I simply stopped trying. In fact, I eventually began hiding what I did for a living from casual acquaintances. It seemed like every time I mentioned my field of work, the person took it as an invitation to inform me about their opinion of the ACA and greedy health insurance companies.
The fact that I worked for a broker, not a health insurance carrier, didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that health insurance is not, and never has been, a health care product. (It’s a financial product.) Nor did it seem to matter that I saw waste, abuse, and obscene profits everywhere in the health care finance field. (I still do.) The arguments weren’t worth lost friendships and worse, so I simply stopped talking about it outside of work.
I tried blogging just about Catholicism for a while, but the fact that I’m a lay person and not a trained theologian worked against me there; I had no expert credentials to claim. The same happened when I tried to consider the topic from the other way around, because I wasn’t married with children. In addition, online American Catholicism had already begun to polarize in some very unpleasant manners. It was no longer enough to just to be living as a Catholic in the world; you either had to be all-in or constantly criticizing.
All this drove me even further into fandom and fan fiction as my primary personal activities. I had already found out that I actually didn’t enjoy professional photography; it was something I was going to do strictly as a hobby. The sheer number of “pro-sumers” out there meant that my work had no special niche or edge, and I saw no point in shelling out thousands of dollars for expensive equipment and photo editing programs.
It’s no wonder, when I look back, that I had so much trouble regularly updating my blog. Besides, it didn’t seem like anyone was reading it, anyway. My voice had long since been drowned out in the noise of the online world, and nobody was really interested in my perspective anymore anyway. So I stopped, choosing instead to focus on other things, although there were still a number of sites where I was a regular commenter.
That was the state of things when my second foray into the employee benefits field seemed like it was beginning to unravel in late 2017. By then, I’d also stopped attending Mass regularly because it seemed like parishes simply didn’t know what to do with a woman who was not vowed religious, but also not willing to anxiously pursue marriage and motherhood either.
I had long since come to an understanding with God: I wasn’t opposed to marriage, but if that was what he wanted for me, he was pretty much going to have to drop someone across my path. The same went for my career. I knew I couldn’t go on as I was, but I was also not sure what I was supposed to do next, so I was muddling through until that answer, too, landed in my lap. And, if it never did, that was all right: I still had fandom and fan fiction to sustain me, even if I couldn’t always discuss those with others.
But in the end, I didn’t need to cling only to that, nor did I need to keep hiding. I also should have remembered the old aphorism about God laughing every time we think we have plans figured out. Because I never, in a million years, would have expected what happened next.
The story will continue in my next post.
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