Hilary Moon Murphy

Endings

First, the good news.

Last Monday, a momentous thing happened: Andy got offered a job by Health Partners. It will be for more money than he was making at eBenX, and for a company that he respects. The long job hunt is over.

To say that I am relieved is an understatement. Andy's anxieties over his jobhunt affected his self-esteem and my ability to function and process stress. I feel like a great burden has dropped away from our family.

Now for the rest. I'm thinking of ending it all.

No, not my life. This journal.

I've come to realize that my commitment to writing these entries is at an all-time low. Now, some might argue that my erratic update schedule means that I have never been really committed to the journal, but that would be false. I always enjoyed the entries that I wrote, when I wrote them. But now, I don't know.

Is it really worth keeping a journal when your heart isn't in it anymore? I think that we all know the answer to that one.

Part of it may be that online journals do not seem to be the personal statement that they used to be. So many people do them now, it seems to be the thing you do when you do not have any other idea what to do with a website.

And so many of the new journals I've seen are, well, boring. Most of them have been decidedly sans personality. Maybe it is because so many of them are on sites that are not really their own. Journals should be about content but the design and graphics of a journal used to say something about the author. Now there is a host of new people on sites like live journal or diaryland that are kind of cookie-cutterish. I would look at them and wonder, why do they bother?

And now I'm asking myself the same question. I find myself less interested in journaling as a statement. It seems so done. What do I have to offer to the dialogue, anyway? I don't know. My journal has always had a following because I let so much of myself seep through, but lately I think that maybe it's time has come and gone.

I have such mixed feelings about this. This journal was cool at one time. I did enjoy it.

And to be perfectly honest, I do not know what I want in its place. Without a journal, what is my website? Nothing, really.

On the other hand, I have been writing a lot lately. I've started some blatantly new stuff, and am getting excited about stories again. My fiction writing and journal writing do compete for very limited time.

I want the fiction writing to get my time and energy.

Lord, it feels like I've already decided, doesn't it?

If I don't post an immediate retraction in the next few days, consider this my good bye to the world of web journaling. Thank you all for being such wonderful readers, and for caring so much.

And if any of you have suggestions of how to redesign my site now that there will no longer be a journal at the heart of it, please tell me. I think I will need all the ideas that I can get.

Hmm