Have I Completely and Utterly F#&ked Up?

Have I completely and utterly fucked up? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself this question. It’s usually late at night, the witching hour, as I lie in bed staring at shadows on my ceiling.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I don’t know why – I traditionally think of myself as a pretty good sleeper – but now that I think of it, maybe I haven’t slept well in years. Maybe part of this is being a single parent to a newborn/baby/toddler, the only one to get up every night when needed (which, until he was about one, was every hour on the hour). Maybe part of this might be perimenopause, something I’ve been researching a bit more as I turned 40 (oh right. I turned 40. I’m sure I’ll write about that one day).

But a big part? A really, really big part of the reason I can’t sleep? It’s because I feel like I’ve thrown all of this away. I feel like I’ve fucked up one of the things I’ve loved the most in my life, one of the only constants in my life over the past two decades.

Yep, I’m talking about this blog.

But as usual – or maybe it’s because I’m on my third coffee of the day – I’ve already gotten way ahead of myself. So let’s take it back, shall we?

I started blogging in 2003 on a platform called Livejournal. There, I blogged about, well, everything. The internet still felt shiny and new, and I loved having this outlet for my writing. Because I’m much faster at typing than I am at writing by hand, I used to write online almost every day: about university classes, about concerts I attended, about crushes, about records and books I liked, about my everyday life in Halifax (where I lived to attend Dalhousie University).

My posts very rarely had photos, and when they did, they were often Polaroid photos or film photos I had developed and then scanned into my computer one by one (I didn’t buy my first digital camera until 2006). I had been keeping journals my entire life growing up in Winnipeg, so blogging just felt like an extension of that; I never really thought about the fact that – other than a handful of friends – other people (strangers, even!) would be reading my words.

Somehow – I still don’t know how it worked – I ended up with a small but incredible following, people who regularly read my posts and then commented. Keep in mind this was before social media, and so I think this all felt very novel; you could add the blogs you liked onto one feed and then scroll through and read everyone’s posts, all of their musings about life. These were the days of Myspace, Xanga, and Tumblr, but I was never on any site other than Livejournal. I followed tons of women from around the world, especially women who loved vintage fashion and feminism. If someone quoted the Riot Grrrl Manifesto on their profile, I probably liked them.

I posted with a lot of regularity on my Livejournal, often five or six days a week for over three years (although a lot of those posts have since been made private, and I don’t remember why I did that). After a summer spent travelling in Europe in 2006, I moved to Toronto, and my blogging decreased a lot; I didn’t connect with Toronto, and I was missing the creative scene in Halifax. After moving to Edinburgh and then Japan, my blogging decreased to once a week, and then once a month, and then… nothing.

It was the decision to switch to WordPress in 2008 that inspired me to start writing online again, even though I didn’t technically post on this blog until 2010. I’ve written about this many times before, but I can so clearly remember the moment I came up with the name This Battered Suitcase; I was lying on my bed in my first apartment in Osaka, and the name just popped into my head. I loved it immediately and registered my site that day. I only realized later that it’s connected to a Jack Kerouac passage from On the Road, and I’ll never know if that was my subconscious at play or just a very good coincidence (even though, ironically, I don’t really like the book).

Once I posted, I was off to the races. If you look at my archives in 2010, I was writing 20+ posts a month. In 2011, the year I spent in Southeast Asia, and in 2012, the year I spent in Central and South America, I was averaging about 15 posts a month. By 2013, I had started writing longer posts, but for the next four years, I’d still average about five posts a month.

Of course, all of this coincided with the rise of social media. I started posting regularly on Facebook and Instagram, often daily on Instagram and sometimes two or three times a day on Facebook. I loved it; there weren’t all these weird algorithms hiding your stuff back then, there weren’t nearly as many trolls, and the platforms felt like fun branches of the blog. I grew to really love photography and had so much fun seeking out new locations for photos, especially when I moved to London in 2013.

It was in London that I first started to get career opportunities because of this blog. It led me to Expedia UK, where I worked on the blogging team for seven years. It led me to many press trips to places like Japan, Cyprus, Italy, Antigua and Barbuda, Spain, and more. It led to numerous media parties, day trips, and partnerships in London. It led to countless friendships with other travel bloggers and travel enthusiasts. It led to this being my full-time job, which is just… wild, considering I didn’t realize people were making money off of their blogs until about 2012.

Again, I’ll never quite know how people found my stuff, either on social media or the blog, but the community grew. To this day, it blows me away that there have been so many kind, supportive people from around the world who have taken the time to read something I’ve written and then comment on it. I wrote these words back in 2017, in a post called How I Got Started: My Journey Through 11 Years of Travelling and Writing About It:

“What I will say is this: every single opportunity I’ve ever received through my blog has been because of you, the people reading these words right now. I don’t take that for granted. Sure, I’ve worked really damn hard on this for the past fourteen years – countless hours every week for over a decade – and there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes, but I believe that blogging is built on a give and… give relationship. I try to provide the best content I can, and in return you give me your time, your time to read and share and like and comment. I am so grateful for that relationship, so grateful that I can do this for a living and that you are there with your support.”

And oh god, do I miss those days of blogging. In the early days, I used to go to markets and buy dozens of little trinkets to send to readers for Christmas, people I had never met. I still have stacks and stacks of all the postcards and letters I’ve received over the years, penpals I made through comments. I used to do “postcard giveaways” where anyone who commented received a postcard from wherever I was in the world. I remember going to a post office in Laos with about forty postcards and I was so filled with joy at seeing all of the international stamps. Many of those blossomed into becoming penpals, back when I’d send my home address to just about anyone. I also loved hosting reader meetups, where anywhere from 10 to 30 people would show up to chat about travelling.

I posted about men I would never see again. I posted stories that I took weeks to write. I posted so many photo essays, things like “here’s a bunch of photos of the colour red“. I posted things that meant so much to me. I posted little updates from wherever I was. I wrote these long, diary-like entries where I wasn’t scared of being perceived as too weird or too wordy (my biggest insecurity is that I feel like I talk too much/share too much when I’m around other people). I posted fun-to-write things like “Everything That Goes Through My Brain Before Publishing a Blog Post” and “I Watched All My Favourite Movies From When I was 13 and Here’s What I Discovered.” I occasionally wrote posts about what to wear in Nepal, or how to get a visa to Bhutan, or things to do in Amalfi, blog posts that are actually helpful… but the overwhelming majority of things I have written online can be summarized as shit I just really wanted to write.

I fucking loved it, all of it.

And the craziest thing about all of it to me was… other people liked it, too. When I posted something online, I knew I’d receive anywhere from 20 to 100 comments on a piece. I took pride in responding to every comment on the blog and on social media, as I absolutely loved interacting with people and felt such gratitude that people had taken the time to write something.

I can never quite track what happened next. I suppose I can connect it to moving back to Canada, where I felt quite lost for a while; I didn’t really have any friends here, and I had left a very vibrant travel blogging community behind in London. I wrote a post called Taking a Break From the Thing You Love in 2017, and I lamented that I had gone 56 days without blogging and dearly missed it.

And despite missing blogging, from then on I posted an average of two to three times a month. While a lot of the articles I did post were pretty extensive – some of them took me weeks to research, write, and edit – I feel like I lost my mojo, for lack of a better term. I was also freelancing a lot more, which took up writing time; it has always been hard to turn down writing opportunities even though I was making a nice income from This Battered Suitcase.

And then, of course, 2020 hit.

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I really did lose everything. All of my freelancing contracts. All of my partnerships. All of my ad and affiliate revenue. It was just… gone, overnight. It sent me into a horrible spiral and every time I tried to write, I couldn’t. I averaged about one blog post a month in 2020 and early 2021. I did, however, start to think about a new blog, one where I could focus on my love for my home province of Manitoba.

And then, of course, I got pregnant.

And then dumped while pregnant.

And then I decided to go ahead with a huge home renovation and create that new Manitoba website, even though I was now pregnant and single.

I don’t think of myself as a masochist, but when the shoe fits…

So yeah. By early 2022, I was six months pregnant and sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my office as I panicked about being a single mom with no income. I remember desperately wanting to blog, but not knowing what to blog about; everything just felt so raw and emotional. Instead of posting here, I threw myself into working on Road Trip Manitoba, writing dozens of researched posts before my son was born; the site launched in February 2022, and I am very proud of it.

And then I had my baby boy. My beautiful baby boy. My angel, my love, the light of my life.

And within ten days of giving birth, I was back to work, writing on my laptop while he slept on my chest. I worked on Road Trip Manitoba and took whatever freelance work I could, churning out thousands of words a month. I’d often write at 3 or 4 a.m., in between breastfeeding. Being a single mom with majority custody took up so much of my time, and any spare time I had went to trying to make any money I could for my little family. I didn’t blog on here for an entire year, simply because I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

But this year, as my son turned two, a lot changed. I now have shared custody, which means my son spends three out of eight days with his dad. I started taking on a few more freelance opportunities, though still not enough for me to feel total financial security. I started having some downtime for the first time since the summer of 2021; I’ve been reading again, and cooking pasta, and taking Dottie on long walks, and working out, and thinking about taking up new hobbies.

Basically, I’ve spent the last few years as a single mom of a baby feeling like I was always treading choppy water, my head barely staying above the surface. But right now? The water feels calm, and it’s more like I’m going for a relaxing swim. It’s nice.

After 2,000 words of rambling, I suppose I should get back to the point of this article. Remember what I said about not sleeping? Yeah. I can’t sleep for a lot of reasons (toddler, perimenopause, the current political state of my country and my neighbouring country, and so on).

But there’s also this endless, nagging feeling that I have completely fucked everything up when it comes to this blog.

As I said, I loved it. This blog was my everything: my passion, my hobby, my career. I loved the connections and friendships I made through it. I loved the community. I loved feeling like my writing was getting better and better, and that I was really enjoying the topics I was writing about (especially when it came to articles about dating and mental health).

And despite missing all of it, the truth is that I’m just so confused. I don’t know what to write about anymore. I don’t know what to post on social media. I lost thousands of followers on both Instagram and Facebook when I announced my pregnancy, and I get it: people who signed up for travel articles or funny dating stories didn’t necessarily want to read about my baby and motherhood.

But here’s the thing: I don’t want to be a mommy blogger. I’m no longer a travel blogger, because I barely travel. I am very (very) happily single, so I don’t have the funny and/or romantic dating stories to tell (although I definitely have quite a few stories left in the bank).

The irony of it all is that I’m feeling happier and more fulfilled in my personal life than I have in years – maybe ever? – and yet, I struggle with what to write. I feel so angry at myself for not blogging more, and for potentially throwing away two decades of work as well as the best fucking community of people I could have asked for. But I really just don’t know what to write anymore, and I feel awful about it.

I often think about writing about single parenthood, especially single pregnancy, because I found so little about that topic online when I was searching in 2021/22. I think about writing like I used to all those years ago, long diary-like entries that don’t even really have a point to them (I used to start all my blog posts on Livejournal with “Dear Diary”). I think about telling all the travel stories I never got around to posting. But with so many new algorithms and changes online, I don’t even know if anyone would see the articles (don’t get me started on how badly my traffic and reach have tanked in the last year with all these new Google and social media updates).

I’m also not sure that people even read blogs anymore. We certainly don’t read long narrative pieces the way we used to; I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to doom-scrolling on social media, my attention span growing shorter and shorter. And don’t get me started on what AI is doing to blogs. I considered starting a Patreon or Substack, but after doing my research on both, I don’t think that’s the route I want to take (although I’m sure I could be swayed).

But then I’m reminded of how I started. I wrote online because I loved writing. I didn’t write online because I expected other people to read it; it was just a fun way to write articles and include photos and links to things I loved. I didn’t care about making money or how many followers I had.

So maybe that’s where I start again: at the beginning. Sitting on this couch in Winnipeg, my dog sleeping at my feet, my son’s toys neatly stacked in the corner, I feel emotional as I reflect on this blogging journey of 21 years. I think of sitting on my couch in Halifax, my favourite records hanging on the wall behind me, writing away about my day at university. I think of that 19-year-old kid who has no idea that blogging would change her life, lead her to amazing friendships and opportunities around the world.

And yes, I do think I fucked up. I think I let a really beautiful, wonderful thing slip away from me as I as turned my attention to other priorities. But I also believe in not giving up on the things you love.

Does this mean I’m going to miraculously start posting on a regular basis again? Oh man, I hope so. But I don’t know. It felt so good to sit here today and write these words, and I hope I can continue to draw on this feeling and come up with more ideas of things to write, even if I know they might not be read by anyone else but me.

I don’t know if any of us can ever go back to the blogging heyday of the 2000s and 2010s, back before social media took over, back before our attention spans were reduced to mere seconds, back before the Internet became as scary as it is. But I miss those days. And maybe, just maybe, I can try to write like those days again.

So… hello. Let’s try this again.