The New TNML
Firstly, I want to say how much I’m looking forward to coming back to this project. I am excited about having a creative outlet again and to get back into some kind of regular writing practice. I also want to thank everyone who was so supportive of the original blog. There is no way I could have done so much with it without knowing I had so many of my favorite people cheering me on. You can still read everything I posted back then on the “TNML 1.0” page of this site which effectively serves as an archive of that work. Going back to it now, some of it makes me laugh, some of it I’m still really proud of, and some of it makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But that’s the writing process for you.
Secondly, I want to acknowledge my abrupt hiatus from TNML 1.0 and explain a bit of where I’m at now. I found myself at the time overwhelmed by my self-imposed once-per-week schedule of content output on the blog and I was showing signs of burnout, both within the project and in my “real” life (the blog was and is very real to my experience, but couldn’t be inclusive of everything I was going through). It was around that time that I realized I had too much on my plate and that I also wasn’t in the right career for the person I had become and how I wanted to grow.
So I took a break to focus on finding not just “a good job”, but “the right job”. After some false starts and setbacks, I did finally find a great opportunity back in September. The new position has had many challenges, starting but not ending with trying to figure out how a whole new industry works and where my responsibilities really fit into the new role.
For those who might remember a lot of my journey through the original project, I was also learning to live with Anxiety and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m still working on it, and probably will be for the rest of my life. I don’t have everything figured out and I likely never will. I think I often pretend to know exactly what to do, and I wish I hadn’t done so much of that in the original TNML.
Then came more life changes and we all got smacked in the face by the Covid-19 pandemic, which we are all still living through. A chorus of social media inputs told me that quarantine was the perfect time to start being creative again and to go back to writing. I wanted to do it, but I had no gas in the tank and no idea of what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to writing the same kind of blog posts anymore because I’m just not the same person I was then, personally or creatively.
The truth is, I don’t think this reincarnation of The New Me, Lately is going to look very much like version 1.0 at all. I certainly won’t be publishing on a weekly basis anymore - that turned out to be a pace I couldn’t maintain long term. I hope to have something to put here every month, but I’m not going to hold myself to that. Last time I got caught up in trying to please my readers and I started seeing it as an obligation rather than an opportunity. This time around, while I really want you all to love what I’m doing, I’m going to try to stick to what I really feel like creating and only post when I’m ready to share it with everyone else.
Lately I’ve been remembering a dream I have to someday publish an actual book, and there’s no way I will ever do that without getting back to writing something again. I still have no idea what that book will look like. Last time around, I found myself really enjoying giving advice based on my own experiences and finding ways to translate my knowledge and the things I was learning into a resource for others. I think now, for the most part, I feel like I can close that chapter.
I think the new The New Me, Lately will be a home for writing experiments in whatever style I find myself gravitating toward. I’ve always enjoyed reading Memoir and Personal Essays, and I want to dabble in writing these styles in the near future. The first real creative work I intend to share (hopefully in the coming week) is more of a Journaling experiment from the early days of quarantine. I may even someday give Fiction writing another shot. This might wind up more closely resembling a loose collection of writing prompts. I hope you’ll stick with me while I figure it out.
However this project turns out, I hope that you all enjoy it and maybe even get something from it that you can take with you in your life. A blessing and a curse I’m coming to reckon with is that I love to be in service to others - so much so that I often forget to act in service of my own interests. I’m aiming to make this project a fulfilling creative outlet for myself that could show other people what it looks like to try earnestly, and probably to fail and try again.
If you’ve been with me since the beginning, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. If you’re new here, please take a look around and I hope you all come with me on whatever this project is going to be. Either way, please feel free to subscribe to updates and/or follow the Instagram page (@thenewmelately) so you don’t miss anything.
