I used to write at my first blog, Living The Life of Tere from 2007 until I didn’t anymore.  I was happy there and learned a lot about writing.  My life changed and I was absent from writing about my life, and life in general, for some time. Eventually, I missed it and I started over here.

Every day on Facebook, my feed brings up On This Day.  For those not familiar, it displays your status, photos, and links that you posted on the same date for each of the past years.  It’s interesting to be reminded of the truly random things we share on Facebook, some significant and some that make you wonder why.  And it’s a little weird how we tend to do the same things on the same day in different years.

A few weeks ago, my feed started bringing up my blog posts that were feeding in as Notes.  I remember setting this up but don’t remember when I did it.  It’s been kind of fun because I am seeing the short and the long versions of what was going on in my life over the years.  Thursday’s feed had my blog post about my Dad’s visit to my brother and his family back in 2008.  At the time it was funny and it still is today.  It was about my dad getting food impacted in his esophagus.  Yes, I am aware that does not sound funny but you probably don’t know my family either.  Just read it.  As I look back at it now, Dad having passed away, that event eventually led me to a better understanding of Parkinson’s Disease, the disease that led to my dad’s death in late 2013.

Today’s “note” made me think about my writing and this new blog.  The post was from 2010.  I was attempting to explain my “guardrails” when I started blogging and when choosing what to write about.  Here is an excerpt:

At the time, I made a decision that I would not write about work.  That would just be stupid.  I would also not give details of my children’s lives that might embarrass them at some point.  I only wrote things they would be ok with reading or that their children might read about them later.  I also decided that I would only share personal feelings and thoughts about others that I was okay with that person reading.  Beyond that, everything else was on the table and open for discussion.  I wanted to tell funny stories.  I wanted to be thoughtful.   I wanted to inspire.

It’s a great reminder to me that nothing has really changed.  Those are my rules here also.  It was also the reason I stopped writing that blog.  I could not share without putting my heart into it and my heart was broken.  People I loved had done hurtful things to my family because they were hurt.  At the time, I needed to write about it but I did not want to be hurtful to others.  I wrote on paper to work through it.  I thought about putting it on the blog but decided against it.

I am glad now that I held back and did not cross that line.  Four years later, things are different and getting better.  I am still a little hurt but I’m not angry anymore.  To have had those words out there would not have helped things get better.  And the words would have been there forever.

I first activated On This Day because I thought it was interesting and fun to reminisce a bit about those minor things that happened one year ago, two years ago, six years ago today.  Who knew I would learn lessons?