I've been contemplating this for a little while now and it's become clear that this space belongs back where it all began, on Blogger.

SquareSpace is great; it has the capacity to to awesome things. I moved to SquareSapce with the intention of taking advantage of all of it's great features. I had a little business brewing that I wanted to add to my existing blog and the gallery and shopping cart facilities were going to be essential to this.

I've since come to know two important things. Firstly, moving across the country, leaving behind my studio setup and starting a new job has forced me to accept that these things take time. And whilst I still have every hope and plan to start this little business, I really do want to do it right. Secondly, I've realised that I don't want to give up on the ultra personal aspects of blogging and that even when I do get my little enterprise off the ground I will want this blog to remain a separate entity so that I don't have to worry about the professionalism or relevance of my posts. (So. Many. Words. Take a breath)

Actually, there's a third important point. I can't stop redesigning my goddamn blog! My job in Adelaide lacked the creativity of my current work, so my constant rebranding/refacing of this space was a little bit of a creative outlet for me. But now I want to use my creativity to do bigger things! I want to create community in Darwin through my work but also outside of it if I can. (Anyone else think that Renew Darwin needs to happen?)

So this weekend I'm going to port it all back into a much simpler design on Blogger. Unfortunately it is not as easy to get my posts back there as it was to get them over here. Anything from 2014 will have to be reposted, so something strange will inevitably happen to the comments. I guess it's lucky that I've been such a slack blogger lately so there won't be as much work involved!

So yay for that and yay for these two exciting pieces of news:

1. TOM JUST GOT AN AWESOME JOB AND WE ARE SO HAPPY AND I AM SO PROUD and these last few weeks have been so tough but IT'S ALL UP FROM HERE!!!!

2. I got my business cards and I'm pretty excited. (read: I totally think that makes me an adult now despite throwing cardboard around the office this afternoon and giggling like a crazy person)

a reminder of what matters.

"I am self-propelled; fuelled from within. I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m not attached to them. I learned a long time ago that if I give them the power to feed me, I also give them the power to starve me." - Steve Maraboli

light

Yesterday's post was heavy, but I felt like I was being true to my idea of what I want this space to be to me. I've learnt that you cannot take the best things in life for granted. Anything valuable needs to be valued. (duh) Our love comes 'easy' because it is so so wonderful; but just because it is easy to love someone does not mean it is always easy to be loving towards them. It can be far too easy to take advantage of the love others have for you; my parents have certainly had their (un)fair share of that throughout the years.

Anyway, I'll stop now. To lighten the mood, here is some light captured on my phone in the past couple of months.

Take care of the ones you love. Then come to Darwin and see some spectacular sunsets with me.

be present in love

For a while it felt like we were looking at each other from opposite sides of soundproof glass we didn't know how to penetrate. I didn't know how to understand what Tom was going through and I felt like he was taking little interest in anything other than his own pain and the job hunt he now had to undertake.

I wasn't really trying to understand how he was feeling, I was actually just trying to make him feel better. I was going to make him feel better godamnit!

But you can't just make someone feel better. You can't just tell them to look on the bright side or focus on all of the good things in their life.

What I really did was bring discord into our usually happy home.

Perspective means everything. From mine, we were suffering under the weight of his feelings of failure and his determined pursuit of new work. But when I eventually stopped telling him that things would be okay and started listening I realised I had it so very wrong. It took me a whole damn week of madness to realise what was wrong with my perspective (everything). We weren't suffering at all; he was suffering and I was being a pretty crappy girlfriend by wishing he would stop the job search and take some downtime with me. He was really just trying to get us back on track to our Darwin dream. I was so determined to have his attention NOW, to know that he was (and we were) okay NOW, that I couldn't see his reasons for being distracted. He was looking to our future.

I stopped trying to change his attitude and behaviour and instead focused on being the girlfriend I wanted to be (not the shrill, pedantic one I had been being).

On Sunday I sent him a formal invitation to a home date in the courtyard: wine and cheese under the stars. We talked all night. He decided to cook me a romantic dinner. We talked about his recent interview and discussed his next move to woo them. He gave me advice about asking a superior for a coffee meeting. We laughed and played "would you rather" and he admitted that considering the price the goon wasn't remotely undrinkable. We got along in the way that made us fall in love in the first place, in the way that makes our love work so perfectly every day. He is my best friend. I never want living together and cleaning schedules and messy kitchens to ruin that perfect combination of love and actual connection. (It didn't, I did)

That's what I learnt this weekend. What did you learn?

work it

So now that I've had my bimonthly blogging epiphany, it's time to stop all of this "blogging about blogging" nonsense. I think we all get it. I want to write more. I haven't been publishing many posts. I've redesigned this space more times this year than I've written honestly about my life. Blah blah blah why do I say the same thing over and over again?

I've been at my job for a month now, and despite having to overcome a little hurdle called "imposter syndrome", I'm loving this job and am inspired and excited every day. I also love feeling like a proper adult with my swipe card hanging off my pencil skirt and the dual-screen setup at my desk. I'm learning a ton and mastering skills I didn't know I could have/need. It makes such a difference to be working towards something. I always struggled with hospitality, not because I didn't enjoy it or do well, but because so much of my time was taken with tasks I'd need to repeat again and again every day to reach the same goal.

babbling. as always.

I had a moment of clarity while I was hanging out the washing this morning. Most of my great moments of clarity come as I my mind wanders whist doing household chores. I'm going to wash the dishes after I write this, so with any luck I'll have solved all of the worlds problems by dinner time tonight.
I started this blog, after deleting I don't know how many others, because I had fallen in love with the unbridled words of Bekah on her now-extinct blog my little loves. She isn't the only blogger to inspire me with tales of life and love and challenges and triumphs, but she was the first to inspire uninhibited honesty in my writing. I tried, as far as possible, to write without a filter, to treat my blog as a truly safe space and forget about who might or might not be reading my words.
As my readership grew, and especially as people in my 'real life' started discovering it, the filter crept back in and I started leaving drafts unpublished. A few at first, then a lot more. Now I hover over that publish button like I'm contemplating deploying an atomic bomb.
Bekah took down her blog because she needed to protect the privacy of her family. Perhaps I wanted to read that as a condemnation of personal blogging in its entirety, but really, she just did what was right for her. And what was right for a young mother of two is not necessarily right for me, whose life is entirely different to hers. When my mum asked me why I wrote my blog about my own life, I told her it was because the blogs I love reading are about the lives of others. Others who share the seemingly mundane and remind me of what is most important: relationships, being present, acknowledging the little things. Actually, I think I shrugged, but that would have been a better response so play along with me.
 I'm not saying I want to share everything, but I want to share the important things. Everything that had been going on since this move to Darwin has been huge and important and often scary, and I don't want leave it out just because it doesn't make my life look neat and shiny. Life isn't neat and shiny.
Tom and I have been struggling since his job fell through. We moved up for a dream that didn't work out and now we have to readjust our expectations and review our gameplan. We've fought, we've cried, but what we've really done is grow together.
The more BIG THINGS that happen without being shared here, the less this feels like the safe space I had envisioned and the harder it is to dive back in. It's been literally a whole year since this vicious cycle started ruining my relationship with this space. I'm declaring a ceasefire. I'm not going to make another one of my many broken blogging promises, but I'm going to attempt to write daily for this week only. I may slip up, so don't feel sad, but I think we could do with some quality time getting to know one another better again. 

Kelsey, I don't know what would have happened to this space if you hadn't reached out to me. You inspire me.