I noticed a tweet from Dean Shareski today, indicating he was beginning his eighth year as a blogger. Curious, I checked the month I began. March 2004, a month after Dean began his blog.
Not as organized as Dean, I’ve lost much of my earlier writing. While becoming a runner, I shared my ups and downs of training and racing on a running blog, where I wrote nearly every day for three or four years. I deleted it in 2009 when it no longer served a purpose. The blog I began with my students (linked in the sidebar) no longer exists either. And the blog I began as the instructional tech coordinator for my school morphed into scmorgan, which you are reading now. (I did lose many of the earlier posts when I moved from typepad to wordpress.)
These days, though, I am finding myself struggling to share. I remember waking up one day last summer, moving through my morning routine of checking twitter, Google reader (and then Google Plus) as I had my morning coffee. Suddenly, a thought flashed into my head. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Closing my laptop, I headed out the door and took a long walk. I wish I could tell you I had some epiphany. And, no, I didn’t immediately stop using social media tools. But these past few months, I have found myself slowing down to a crawl.
I value the friends and connections I’ve made online, but I have tired of the conversations and this need to always be “on.” Instead of joy, I feel stress. I know, that’s my problem, not social media’s. Yet, I wonder….
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I am sharing about not wanting to share. I suppose that is part of the letting go.
As I struggle to figure out to what extent I want to live online, I look for the transformative learning that will occur for me. Time will tell whether I will feel a need to reconnect on a regular basis. As Thoreau said, “Things do not change; we change.”