An Unintended Hiatus

After months of getting further and further “behind” on documenting our travels, it has now been a number of weeks since I’ve posted anything on our blog. We’ve posted a few small updates on our Facebook page, but it’s been crickets over here at ye olde website.

If you’re reading this and we haven’t lost you as a follower, you may have been wondering what we’re up to. After it took us until March to post about Halloween and Peter’s birthday, joking about the statute of limitations lasting as long as the candy, and making promises once again to try to get caught up, we unintentionally took a 2 month blog hiatus.

This time, no more cute excuses, apologies, or promises. This time, an explanation in the form of an update and a sort of a “re-launch” with some changes to how we continue to blog in the future.

Why the Silence?

Different seasons have different routines. This is true for everyone, but in our lifestyle, seasons can change a little more frequently. We spent the winter in southern California, moving less frequently and shorter distances. We spent this time in a new-to-us depth of community, surrounded by like-minded families who we have grown to love as family. Our tribe. This time meant a lot to us in many ways, and is worthy of its own post, but in terms of blogging, I found myself with a surge of creative energy and inspiration coupled with a little more free time while our kids were playing outside with friends for hours and hours each day. I was writing regularly and it worked great. In February, when we started moving east, the time and opportunity diminished. Then in March and part of April, we were dealing with some unexpected bureaucratic headaches that took a lot of energy and dried up a lot of that creative energy and inspiration I had enjoyed throughout the winter. Time was shorter and I had to prioritize the work that puts food on the table – which unfortunately isn’t this blog.

Inertia is a real and powerful force. The longer the blog was still the more effort it took to get the momentum going again, and because of our format of documenting everything we saw and did along our travels, I was always feeling myself slipping farther and farther behind. It was discouraging and turned something that I really enjoy into a burden. It was one more thing in my day to fail at, and most days I experienced it that way. There was too much happening at the same time and planning each day forced us to prioritize and make hard decisions. All the same, I tend to have high and unrealistic expectations of myself and struggle to extend myself grace. Unwilling to drop anything I cared about, I tried to prioritize everything, which of course is not actually prioritizing at all. I suspect I am not alone in this.

That’s not to say that we stopped traveling or enjoying the different places along our route! We loved spending time with old friends and making some new friends during the month we spent in Texas. We have sought out national parks and excellent museums all along our route. Sometimes the hard decisions were to prioritize family time and do something fun together despite the growing list of other things that were demanding our time and attention. Other times we apologized to the kids first thing in the morning that the day would be full of driving from one government agency to the next, requiring them to be calm and well-behaved in a row of boring waiting rooms. Most days were somewhere in between.

It’s been a season that’s been short on time and even shorter on energy and motivation for writing and other creative pursuits. The problem is that creative expression in general, and writing in particular, are important ways that I get energy and feel more alive. Add into the mix the feelings of guilt and failure for not being able to live up to my own expectations, and the exhaustion of continuing to try anyway, and it’s not hard to see that I got myself stuck in a pretty unhealthy cycle.

Something’s Gotta Give

This cycle was not maintainable, and it was nothing like the way we wanted to live our life. One of the reasons we chose this lifestyle was to be able to slow down the pace, have more time together, skip the stress and live something that felt like life and not just survival. It was never our intention to trade one variety of stress for another and just take the whole circus on the road. We expected there to be chaos in the transition phase, but after 18 months, we saw ourselves settling into patterns that weren’t what we wanted. We would have the conversations regularly about how to fix it, what to change, and how to get into healthier cycles. Unwilling to eliminate the things we’re most passionate about and unable to eliminate the things that keep us afloat in practical ways, nothing ever got cut from the list. I would walk away from those conversations with renewed resolve to just… try harder. Do better. Be more… somehow. And because I know I am not alone in this struggle, you all know how that would work out. I spent so many of my days feeling that I was inadequate, failing repeatedly at all the things that were most important to me. The effort to somehow “be enough” in my own perception was exhausting and destructive.

There were plenty of red flags. Most of them were small and it wasn’t too hard to explain them away. Around Easter we traveled to Dallas to spend time with great friends that we only get to see once a year, at best. We parked in their driveway so that we’d have plenty of time to hang out. I wanted so badly to hang out with them in the evenings, but somehow all the energy I could muster was to watch TV together, and even then I fell asleep most of the time. I was so disappointed, but again turned all that frustration against myself. Try harder, I chided. Do better. What’s wrong with you? You’re wasting yet another opportunity!

Then about a week or two ago, I got sick. The kids had had colds and had each taken a turn having a day of being feverish and lethargic. I felt myself start to sniffle but had no idea that I would end up in bed for 4 days. It knocked me flat. I had it coming. And suddenly, without strength to do anything else, I had time to think.

Going Forward

I thought about a lot of things, and I won’t pretend to have solved all the issues that have been unsolvable for months. But I do have some new insights, that will hopefully grow and develop, that I will be able to post about soon. But this post is about the blog specifically so I’ll start with my thoughts about that.

So often I get ideas for things to write and post about, and I just write myself some notes and make a list of things to write about someday. When I’ve finally caught up with the travel-log. And I make a list of posts to write about all the places we’ve been and there’s about 15 posts to catch up with. Even if I get disciplined enough to post once a week, it will take me almost 4 months to write those. And what am I doing during those 4 months? Traveling and seeing more things that also need to be documented so the finish line keeps moving. I love writing about what we see and do, but there are other things that I’d also like to write about that are related to RV life and our lifestyle choices.

I’ve decided to release myself from the detailed documentation of every place we go and everything we see. I will still write about many of these things, but maybe focus on hitting the highlights. Or at least allow myself the freedom and flexibility to write what I want to write and not what I feel like I have to write. It’s much more fun to write about what we’ve done recently than what we did several months ago. It’s much more satisfying to allow the freedom of creative expression, to write what’s on my mind and in my heart, not what’s on my scheduled list. Maybe I need to be more disciplined to build a successful blog, but I think I’ll create more, better, and more interesting content if I’m following where inspiration leads and not trying to plan and schedule my posts months in advance.

It might not work. I don’t know. But the truth of the matter is that my current approach has proven itself to not work well for me. So it’s time to try something new and see what happens.

Thanks for reading! What would YOU like to read more about here on Lindstroms on the Road?