Confessions of a Former Blogger

Reflections on the Full Circle Feeling of Substack

{The emergence of something new and wondrous.}

When my career as an artist reached its ten-year anniversary, something new and thrilling emerged: blogging. By this time Swirly, the independent greeting card line I created, had expanded to an internationally known brand with multiple license contracts and more than 1200 wholesale accounts. I built the business in a way that now seems almost quaint; that I had a website in 1995 was no small thing. There was no smart phone, no social media, and no one was setting their sights on “going viral.” It was me, my computer, and a fax machine, along with independent sales reps around the country.

I expanded Swirly at a careful, steady pace. In the beginning, every card was printed and assembled in-house, so I didn’t take on additional sales reps until I knew I could handle the orders. Eventually the time came to invest in inventory, secure an office space, and take on more reps. I had a booth at the National Stationery Show and started getting inquiries from different companies about licensing. At its peak, there were Swirly greeting cards, journals, rubber stamps, magnets, clocks, coasters, pillows, frames, photo albums, embroidery kits, bookmarks, t-shirts, and oodles of other goodies in a special line for tween girls called Swirly Girl. I worked with Target, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and The Girl Scouts of America. A Swirly gift book was translated into three languages.

I feel a unique kind of gratitude for the freedom I was afforded by not having to spend an ounce of attention on things like Instagram. I created greeting cards. Customers bought them. From that simple formula, I built a successful brand that inspired people all over the world.

And then, around 2005, as Swirly was starting to wind down, I found blogging.

It was like discovering a vast, wide-open space I never could have envisioned but still somehow felt like I’d wanted it for a long time. What I longed for was real—to connect, support, and collaborate with other like-minded souls—and then all of a sudden here was this thing that helped me do exactly that. I found artists, photographers, writers, and other people who simply had interesting things to say. I’d start my day visiting all of these new virtual friends, reading everyone’s recent posts about whatever was on their mind.

This brave new world happened to coincide with a turning point in both my artistic and personal life, so I had plenty to write about. It was the beginning of my foray into mixed media work and I shared lots of stories about my creative process. I also wrote about what it meant to live authentically and to be a positive, inspiring force in the world. A quick review of the titles I gave my first blog entries reflects the ideas and questions I was pondering:

• Crossroads

• Changes

• Resistance

• Awareness

• Breaking Through

• Just Do It

• Starting Over

• Alignment

• Moving Through Fear

• No Attachments

• Gifts in Strange Places

I wrote about moving, insomnia, and happy coincidences, about my first trip to Tokyo and the views from my window. This was just in my first year as a blogger, when I posted more than one hundred entries and developed a following of readers that shared their own musings in the comments section of my blog. I loved what blogging provided—direct, personal connections to all kinds of interesting, creative humans. I believed with all my heart that I was finding my people.

And I wasn’t alone. I organized a private retreat of sorts with eight other bloggers in early 2006. After we all (of course!) blogged about it, I received so many eager inquiries wanting to know how on earth did I do that? that I ended up creating a brief “How To” document for anyone who reached out.

Over the ensuing years, I organized a number of art shows with my mixed media work, some with my fellow bloggers. I brought my mixed media work and writing together in Ordinary Sparkling Moments, a book I published on my own before today’s array of self-publishing platforms came into existence. I created projects for my readers to participate in and, at times, kept up with multiple blogs. One was called Sparkletopia, which was a year-long endeavor that was all about things that inspired me—artists, films, books, whatever. At one point I was generating more than 500,000 hits a month.

I also traveled across miles and oceans to spend time with my blogger friends—all over CA, the UK, and New Zealand—and relished the idea of being part of a global community of extraordinary humans. My fellow bloggers and I used words like sisterhood and tribe. We cheered each other on, and thought it was only a matter of time before some of us would end up being on Oprah.

There are many of these early fellow bloggers I am still in touch with, and a few of us have been chatting lately about all the ways Substack feels like a modern-day blogging platform. Of course it has more of the digital bells and whistles one expects these days. On Substack I can post what I’ll call a blog entry or I can post a small note and image à la Instagram. I can share a video, start a podcast, and initiate a live chat thread. All the options available on other platforms separately are under one roof, and instead of having to hop around from one blog to another, the latest entries from everyone I follow (and many I’ve never heard of) are in one place. All new and better organized, yet I still see it through the lens of a former blogger.

This lens is neither good nor bad, but it is specific to my experience from those early and, dare I say, heady days of blogging, a time when so many of us were thrilled at all the possibilities we saw in this online, creatively-connected world. When I see the parallels between Substack and blogging, it leads me down a path of thinking about what, in the midst of all the fun and frolic, lessons I was learning as I crossed the bridge from “Before Blogging” to today’s obsessions with algorithms and “like” buttons. Because there were profound lessons, they just didn’t end up being what I would have predicted.

* * * * *

We learn what we need to learn. Or, perhaps, we are presented with opportunities to learn what we need to learn and we may or may not take them. If you tapped my circa 2007 self on the shoulder and asked me to tell you what I thought would end up being the most valuable lessons of my time in the blogging/online creative community, I would have talked about learning how to be a great friend, building a community, artistic collaboration, and authenticity. And I did learn about those things, especially over the course of all the gatherings, shows, workshops, and retreats I was involved with—experiences that created beautiful memories and helped me spread my wings.

All the while, a related, but different, kind of lesson was also tugging at me as undeniable cracks became visible in my starry-eyed belief that only good things would ever come from this still-evolving form of creative expression. Because, like any other cohort of messy humans, there were misunderstandings and disappointments.

The online aspect of any such kerfuffle made what would have otherwise been a private experience feel public and exposed. Any exclusion in the real world spilled over into the blogging world. It felt, at times, like 8th grade on steroids (and this was before Instagram!) As a community grappling with this new piece of technology, we were figuring out how to use it as a force of good and also how to find our way through the hurt feelings and bruised egos that were intensified by the public nature of blogging.

The good news is that there was a vein of gold buried within my own particular disappointments that motivated me to zero in on unhealthy patterns. From there I developed new habits that cleared my path of the thorns and weeds that I realized were contributing to a certain kind of drama. This kind of reorienting was happening in a few areas of my life—with my creative community/friends, in my new marriage, and in our blended family. While I was putting in the hours writing books, making art, and planning workshops I was also working hard to heal old wounds and bring my values, choices, and actions into alignment.

Being part of the blogging community, and engaging with it the way I did, was one of the most significant catalysts for this time of intense self-reflection. It was also a period of asking a lot of questions. What did I do to contribute to this not especially pleasant situation? In placing such huge expectations on myself, do I end up placing unreasonable expectations of those around me? What assumptions am I making that others aren’t aware of and/or didn’t agree to?

Over time, I started to see that the lessons I needed to learn were less about How To Be the Best Friend/Cheerleader/Artist Ever! and more about how to engage with the world in a way that doesn’t weigh anyone down with assumptions, expectations, and my own limited perspective on pretty much anything. AND (it is in all caps because it is a very important and) I also needed to accept the fact that people are going to see what they want to see and think what they want to think. It won’t always be fair or make sense. (Read The Four Agreements for more about that.) The choice, then, is whether or not I stew in resentment about it or let the situation be what it is.

Were these the transformative insights I thought would end up being the through-line of my days as a blogger, the thread that ended up winding its way around nearly everything I did over those years? Not likely. Was I the only blogger trying to figure these things out just as social media was starting to nip at our heels? I can’t imagine. Still, the things I that I believed, with all of my heart, would populate my field of memories at some far-off moment in the future (say, 2025) are exactly what I thought they’d be—full of color, and beauty, and the magic of artistic kinship. I’m confident most everyone else from that Age of Blogging would have similar praises and gratitudes.

We were earnest about wanting make a positive mark in the world—a theme I saw so clearly, right from the start, I ended up writing a book about it—and eager to make beautiful things. That we stumbled along the way didn’t make us unusual. Any entanglements were the stuff of normal, everyday human interactions that happened to have an element we’d never had to process. I’m curious to know what others would say about their own unexpected lessons or revelations their time as a blogger inspired.

* * * * *

I’m not on Substack so I can be part of an active online community. I’m here to write and to read what other people are writing. I love seeing so many familiar names here—people I met way back in 2005 when we were all new to this strange, exotic wonderland. We all had to find our way, and figure out how to exist online. I’m not afraid to say we were Trailblazers. We were pioneers in the vast digital universe that continues to expand at rates our brains can’t comprehend. With a clear awareness of all the ways I messed up and stumbled big time on the road from then to now, I see my decision to join Substack as a Full Circle moment. It is a return to that first love of writing what is in my heart and on my mind in real time, in the hope that it hangs like a lantern on someone else’s path.

I’ll close with a thought experiment my husband likes to do. When I look at all that has changed during the two decades since the first days of blogging, I see a wild explosion of technological expansion. This is when my husband would invite me to then ponder what changes took place during the previous twenty years—between 1985 and 2005. Back in the eighties, there was awe and wonder over the Sony Walkman, VCRs, and MTV. How would my teenage years have been different with access to the internet? (I can’t imagine it would be good.) “Now,” my husband would say, “Imagine what might happen between 2025 and 2045.”

I can’t speak to what technological advancements might be just beyond the horizon, or pontificate on future modes of communication, transportation, and commerce. But I’ll tell you what I do know: I’ll keep finding lessons I need to learn. Hopefully I’ll give them my full attention. If not, I’m certain they’ll keep showing up.

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Were you there in the early days of blogging? I’d love to hear your stories—what you loved, what you learned, what you wrote about.

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In the Studio

The countdown is on! We’re just a few weeks away from Opening Night at Three Bird Layne, where a new body of work will be presented. I hope to see you there!

Three Bird Layne | Culver, IN

Opening Night Friday, July 18th, 6:00pm

I’ll also be there from 1-5 on Saturday, July 19th

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One More Thing

I discovered one of the most exquisite stationery boutiques ever in Mineral Point, WI. As I walked out of the store a couple of weeks ago, I told the lovely saleswoman I was pretty sure we were separated at birth. We had so much fun filling my basket of goodies! Head over to MayDay Press to see their offerings, and if you get a chance to visit them, don’t pass it up!