I had to go back and look up the date. A couple of days ago, August 10th, was the first anniversary of this blog! Yeah!
Part of me wants to downplay it. I tend to do that with things I value, from a long ago lesson that if I really care about something it will be taken away. (Therapy saved my life, but hasn’t yet removed that doubt.)
Where I Came From
Before I started Third of a Lifetime, I’d come back from several years of mental darkness and struggle. In the year prior, I’d started three other blogs that each died after a few months. I never allowed myself to become too attached to them. These failures reinforced my fears — that I’m not good enough, that I can’t seem to stick with anything very long, that I’d had a long string of attempting various writing projects, and not finishing them.
The Value of Twitter
So I began this blog with much trepidation, but resolved that this one is going to stick. It’s still here, a year later, in large part due to my having joined Twitter last September. I found a very knowledgeable and giving mental health community; resources galore; good friends; outside-of-the-box ideas; and simple fun. The fun is important, as I’d not had much for a long while.
With Twitter, you can see exquisite, valuable ideas and links, and then they scroll off into oblivion. The waste of it all bothered me. I wanted a way to save some of these things. I noticed that @JaneFriedman — publisher of Writers Digest — was also publishing weekly Best Tweets for Writers on her There Are No Rules blog. I asked how she gathers and compiles them. She was so gracious and generous with her info, including allowing me to copy (“clone”) her Yahoo Pipes aggregator. Unfortunately, I am no techie and never got it to work right, but that doesn’t matter because she gave me a taste of what is possible.
New Year’s Eve 2009
On New Year’s Eve, I published my first Best Tweets for Trauma Survivors. I also published the first weekly Favorite TweetStuff post, a compilation of endearing, inspiring, quirky, and fun tweets. It’s a way for me to not take myself so seriously.
Dissociation Blog Showcase
Along the way, I published the Dissociation Blog Showcase, a work in progress of currently 165 blogs! It’s the most popular page here, and I work each week to expand it. As always, if you, or anyone you know, blogs about experience with dissociation, let me know!
For someone who hadn’t finished much of anything for several years, I am very proud to say: both Best Tweets and Favorite TweetStuff have been published continuously every single Friday since New Year’s Eve 2009. These weekly posts, and the Dissociation Blog Showcase, give me a sense of meaning and purpose I’d not felt for many years.
And I have plans!
- I am working on an annotated compilation of all the linked Best Tweet resources from 2010, and my hope is to release it on New Year’s Eve! There’s a symmetry to that, no?
- I’m also immersing myself in all things ebook and Amazon Kindle, because by year end — hopefully much sooner — my book Becoming One will be converted into Kindle and other ebook formats. (My publisher retired and closed her business several years ago, so determining my options, and getting the proper expert help to do it well, falls to me.)
- I am building an outline for book number two.
A year ago, I could not see anything like this being possible. I almost didn’t recognize it now. Trauma survivors can be so wary of anniversaries that we blot out the positive milestones, too! This is a very happy outcome for me. Hard work does pay off.
Many thanks to everyone who follows this blog, leaves comments, and retweets the Best Tweets posts. Thank you, especially, to the great folks on Twitter who tirelessly tweet the best resources! I am beyond grateful.
It’s all good! Enjoy!
