Blogging Sabbatical

Jason Pitzl-Waters, over at The Wild Hunt, made me promise him something once. He made me promise not to go crazy. Because writing for the Pagan community can do that to people. So in order to keep my promise, I’m taking a week off. Blogging here will resume on the 16th, and if that changes, a note will be posted here on the 16th.

I began blogging because I needed writers here on Patheos, and I was both cheap and dependable, so I hired myself. Sometimes this blog was the only reliable content on the Pagan portal on Patheos, so I kept doing it. And I built a following roughly 1/3 the size of The Wild Hunt’s readership. That’s nothing to sneeze at, so I kept doing it.

But maybe it’s time to change that. I don’t have the personal support I need to deal with the stress that blogging entails, and my coping skills aren’t as effective as they used to be. Maybe it’s time to go back to my original vision, and spend my time only promoting other people’s work, giving my voice a rest.

There will be whispers over why I’m doing this, because no one ever takes a statement at face value. But it’s not due to a single post, or a single person, or a single debate. It’s the cumulative negativity that has grown to the point that I can no longer hear the positive. It’s the several times I’ve received profanity-laced e-mails telling me I’m a piece of shit from people I considered colleagues. It’s the 20th time someone who disagrees with me has decided to critique my hair or my weight because they lack the ability to debate my ideas. It’s the 100th time someone has commented on my blog just to tell me I’m stupid, irrelevant, angry or petty. It’s the countless times I’ve worked hard on something only to have the first response make it entirely obvious the person didn’t actually read my post, but instead they are responding to an argument in their head they are already familiar with debating.

So I’m taking a week from blogging, but not a week from work because we’ve got a bunch of stuff in the works behind the scenes here at Patheos. I’m turning comments off for that week. Maybe I’ll post something from the archives on social media, maybe I won’t. And on Monday I’ll announce my decision, as well as pointing out any groovy changes that have taken place on the site.

I don’t need this blog to do good work here at Patheos or in the Pagan community, and maybe I’d do better work without it. I’ll let you know what I decide, and keep my promise to Jason in the meanwhile.

In the meantime, enjoy some geekery: