How long is it since I wrote for just the love of it? It feels like years. I’ve been writing to build a career for so long, the love just died. Betrayal and failure got their hands on my writing gift and tore it down. The love just died.

But here I am again. My dear friend Nish tweeted the other day about writing for the love of it, returning to pure blogging, just sharing our stories. I and others were inspired.

I wrote piece on my sofa yesterday. And now I can’t stop. I’m writing again. I have no agenda, no plan, no strategy, no secret formula, and I’m sure as hell not thinking about SEO and grabby headlines.

Just showing up, writing, because writing is fun. Because sharing stories is good for the soul. Because writing about our lives is like free therapy.

For long time back there I got caught up in the tidal wave of platform building. The writing which came out of this, whilst it had heart, always had an agenda. It’s to grow a platform, to further a career, to promote self. And pursuing those things with the best intentions and motives can be an honourable thing.

Problem is, like all good things, we can have too much of it. And of course, it strokes our ego just a little too much. This definitely happened to me. Writing became about making myself more valuable, about making me special, about being important. Even when I had good intentions, even when I kept my integrity, it was work more than love, and when betrayal and failure found me, as they can find us all, the love wasn’t strong enough to survive.

So I’ve retreated. I’ve changed my website, taken down all the coaching packages which never sold. I’ve stopped it being a site for a business. There’s still coaching available, but it’s much more informal and less prominent. It’s there if people want it, but I’m not pushing it, and there’s no packages anymore. I’ve changed the title banner on the site to reflect where I am.

I just want to scale back and focus on reclaiming my life, reconstructing my life one story at a time. That’s the new tagline on my home page, and it sums up exactly where I am. I will tell my story in a book one day soon. But for right now, I just need to be fully present in this moment, tell my story now, be true to where I am at this moment. Open my eyes and peer round the corner and investigate my life.

And I want to get excited about writing again, find the joy in the everyday telling of my story, of our stories.

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(Picture Source: Mourgefile)