Hi! Hello! It’s me, the sole proprietor of this ‘on the journal’ tab of Chelsea Laine Francis dot com.
And yes, I know! I know! I haven’t been around these parts since April. I stepped away from writing things down and pressing publish because it was making my anxiety worse, not better, and that seemed to be counter productive to what I wanted out of 2018. I decided with a lot of tears, and a lot of angst that I would be done with blogging forever because isn’t blogging dead anyway?
And then-- as fate would and often does have it-- I got an idea that I couldn’t shake. I kept dreaming of creating a space online where people could openly and freely talk about failure and success and finally in June I started it.
This year it has totally consumed every part of my life. I think about the concept of failure and success as two intertwined friends all the time. I write about it over there sometimes, but mostly I just publish other people’s work which is SO REWARDING.
But in the past month or so I’ve been back in my Google docs, furiously processing the past year of my life and I need an outlet.
Since Chelsea Laine Francis dot com will be getting a revamp in early January, I thought it might be a good time to start pressing publish on some of my thoughts again. Looking back through this year I’m a little bummed to not have it immortalized somewhere, though my therapist says I don’t have to do that with everything and she’s right.
Sidebar: For years now I’ve carried around this immense guilt about not being a person who consistently keeps a physical journal. I want to be able to remember everything and I want to have a physical record of it but I CAN’T KEEP UP WITH IT and it drives me nuts. Through therapy I’ve discovered that's a manifestation of me being afraid I’ll waste my life somehow. And because Briana Oakley kept a journal in the 3rd grade and I’ve thought that was the definition of having your life together since then.
Anyway, I’ve gone through a lot this year. I’ve put my head down, gotten honest with myself, faced a lot of demons (like my fear of saying the word demon! really!) and I’ve come out on the other side of those things.
I need space to breathe and say things out loud on the internet. This feels like as good a place as any to do that. So here I am.