Back in the early days of blogging, when I was paying attention to views and comments and reader engagement, I noticed a few times each year when statistics would fall across the board. Some of those drops made sense – around the winter holidays, for example. But without fail, stats also fell off sometime in mid to late July and remained low until September. I don’t know if it’s the heat – whether that’s miserable heat like in the south, making people depressed, or welcome heat in the north, letting people spend more time outside their homes – or that it’s a popular vacation time or possibly related to school timing schedules. I just knew that I’d suddenly go from averaging hundreds to thousands of views each day to a hundred on a good day.

Since this time period corresponded in the latter half to my yearly August-Depression, and I’ve never been fond of the heat in July either, I started taking this time of year (if not the entire summer) as a blogging break. Sometimes I’d announce that I’d be gone, other times I’d just sort of shuffle along, posting lackadaisically in random spurts. That’s kinda what I’ve been doing this year. I haven’t had a lot to say – the heat affects everything from my reading mood to how often I can go out to do a photoshoot – so I’ve dropped back to bare minimums again.

As the summer blahs have come over me, and as I begin a series of transitions on social media (aka my Facebook profile will no longer exist in just a few weeks, my GR profile won’t be used anymore after this year), I’ve once again begun thinking about letting go. Fifteen years is a long time, and honestly, I’m not sure I have anything left that I want to write about. I’m starting a new period in my life. When I began this blog, I was settling into life as a stay at home mom. I needed something to give structure to my day that would also let me reach out to other likeminded folks. Blogging has been good for me. But it’s also probably gone well past its usefulness to become a crutch, letting me avoid things I should be doing instead.

My vision board for 2023 is all about RELEASE. Letting go of things that I’ve held onto for too long, finishing those things that I’ve been putting off. Does anyone remember Syabira from the last season GBBO? Each week after she’d been Star Baker, the hosts would try to tease her about the pressure of that, and she’d say that it didn’t matter, that each new week was “the clean slate.” That’s been my motto this year – to start each month with “the clean slate,” to stop carrying things forward, not little things like getting backed up on podcast episodes, not big things like important goals. I want to transition to this new time in my life fully, with the clean slate.

Minds change, and I’m not going to say for definite that I’m leaving the blog. But my mind has started to lock onto Valentine’s Day as the end. That’ll be sixteen years, and while sixteen isn’t a year I would have chosen myself, I can’t deny that I’m tickled by the correlation to the Cosmere (where sixteen is a major thematic element). And sixteen might be enough. Again, I’m not going to say for sure, but given the way my thoughts have been trending, I know the time to end is definitely approaching.

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Note: After writing all this, I looked back through my blog feed-reader. Other than my own personal feeds and my library/wowbrary feeds, I had a total of 54 blogs listed under various categories. I go through this list about 1-2x per year, and remove blogs that I no longer want to follow (which generally means “blogs that haven’t posted in 5+ years”). But honestly, I’ve kept a lot of blogs from folks I loved following, even when they hadn’t posted in 10+ years, just in case they come back one day. This time, I decided to pay more attention, and I checked every single blog. Of those 54, 30 no longer existed at all. Even though I’d kept them “just in case,” their actual websites were gone, privated, or co-opted by spam sites. Of the remaining 24, a further 7 hadn’t posted for at least five years, so I removed them too. This leaves me with only 17 folks in my feed reader, and of those, only FIVE post at least a couple times per year. Five. Y’all. Blogging is dead. It’s done. I’ve made it to the end, and now I just have to figure out how to taper away (which isn’t easy for me).