Before and after – on blogging

I still remember the day I discovered blogging. I was on a cruise in the mid-Atlantic, heading towards Morocco. It was the late 1990s, and I’d been running the Hysterectomy Association website for a few years. Every page on the website was hand-coded using Notepad, taking time I didn’t have to write the content, make sure the code was correct, and make sure links to other material on the site worked as expected.

Dozens of emails would land on my virtual desk every day asking me for information, often the same questions, which was why I was creating yet more pages for the website and hoping the ever-increasing menus would take the strain, and that women could find what they were looking for.

I’d added what was known as a ‘guest book’ so visitors could leave comments and, to my surprise, they started talking to each other through it. Slowly it dawned on me it had become a community, a safe space for women to talk about their experiences. It was obvious something about the website needed to change but I couldn’t afford the prices of the content management systems available at the time; and then came the cruise.

I was bored, it was a day at sea and I wandered the ship looking for a distraction, any distractio! It was February, so staying out on deck wasn’t really an option and I happened across a small room with computers lined up against one wall, there weren’t many, maybe four or five altogether, but they were all connected to the Internet via a modem linked, I suppose, to a satellite.

I sat down, logged on, began playing and came across an early version of Blogger. I set up an account and started writing. It occurred to me then it might solve the problem I had with the Hysterectomy Association, but to be honest it wasn’t evolved enough at that stage so I abandoned it and carried on hand coding pages until 2005 when I discovered WordPress and created my first personal blog. Eventually I moved all the content from my hand coded pages to a self-hosted WordPress site in 2008.

But that is really only the start of the story because what I’d really found was a way to communicate with other like-minded people about topics I was interested in. It’s just that, other than the Hysterectomy Association, I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. Originally, my blog was called ‘Woman on the Edge of Reality’ with the intention of talking about the nature of life, the universe and everything (according to Linda!). But, I hadn’t reckoned on what that subject might look like so it became a home for all my lost thoughts and not really of much interest to anyone else.

It stayed in the virtual desert for over a decade with brief forays into Thursday Throng author interviews and, as these gained momentum, I found it harder to write down even the briefest of thoughts about the topics I was interested in. My concern was for the audience reading it. Was I making sense? Did people agree with me? Was I going to alienate the authors who sought me out to share their work? The more concerned I became, the more I self-censored, and I noticed I was doing the same thing at the Hysterectomy Association. In both these places I was no longer me, I was being whomever I thought the audience wanted to hear.

For those of readers who may have been around for a while you’ll know I eventually closed The Hysterectomy Association. I had many reasons, but probably the one uppermost at the time was my cynicism about the medical model used as a focus of most healthcare interventions.

In talking to, and with, the millions of women who had used the site over the 20+ years of its existence I’d come to recognise that the Western medical model didn’t work to develop a fully healthy person, because health and well-being are so much more than a problem with a body part or function. But I couldn’t write about that because I was worried that women using the site would reject the message I was sharing, and that those who referred their patients to me for information would stop. In other words I’d lose the livelihood, albeit small, it was giving me.

Closure was much easier than wrestling with my conscience every day about the course of action I was tacitly promoting.

But I didn’t want to lose the information itself, it still had validity and was relevant to the decision making process. So I created a hybrid website, bringing all three of my WordPress sites together into one ‘happy’ whole. My intention as those who received the email announcing that change in 2019 will remember was to be free to write the things I hadn’t felt able to write before.

In 2020 I reinstated the Hysteria Writing Competition. Originally, I had decided to close it at the same time as I closed the Hysterectomy Association after all the two were inextricably linked, or so I thought! But the pandemic came along and I thought it might be a good thing to give back. It worked, the two were not as connected as I believed and since then there have been even more Hysteria Writing Competitions. Once again I was back in the same predicament with multiple sites, the only difference being I now had more clarity about what I wanted to say and I didn’t want to hold back. It was obvious a new plan was needed, and so in 2021 I moved everything to Substack.

Today, I’ve left the Substack platform. It didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped it would. The need to separate content into silo’s became obvious as more and more writers were connecting with me there. Again, I didn’t have a place to write what I wanted to say about the topics I’m interested in. Once again, I have three (different) websites: this one about Me, the Hysteria Writing Competition, and Crystal Clear Books and this time around it makes more sense to do it this way.

As a writer and someone who supports writers, it is important to me that I have a place I can share my own writing which can act a little like a shop window, if you like; it is also essential that I create information for writers as well. This blog is that place. Over the next few months I will bring over much of the content I originally created for Substack where it is still relevant, and I will write about topics of interest to writers. You will find both in the newsletters I send out in the future.

So what might you expect to find here?

I occasionally venture into fiction, mostly short flash attempts and the occasional longer novel or novella. So you’ll find more of that. I’m also planning to serialise the novel I published in 2024. The last few years have been challenging. My lovely ma became ill and passed away in 2022, My sister was taken seriously ill for a few months in 2024. There was an estate to wind up and I was made redudent although, if I’m honest, I was glad to step away from my career persuading people to use technology I no longer believed in. These years have taught me much about myself; shown me bits I’m not comfortable with as well as things I actively don’t like about myself, as well as much that I celebrate and want to develop. It has built on the life lessons and insights about ‘reality’ that have been flooding through our collective consciousness over the last couple of decades. It was against this background I began the task of creating a personal manifesto. Things I know to be true at the very core of my being around the themes I want to explore in much more depth.

• We are all walking miracles
• Everything that matters and has meaning is ‘free’
• We are all greater than the sum of the individual parts that make up a body
• Life works when we step out of our own way
• We are each an integral part of the whole
• We are all already perfect, whole and complete – we’ve just forgotten this essential knowledge
• We are all connected to everyone and everything
• I am, therefore I think – and yes I wrote a blog post about it in 2020 which I will share here in due course
• Creativity is our natural state
• There is nothing that separates us.
• Technology does not serve us, instead we serve it and that is not sustainable
• Technology will not save us
• Constant economic growth is a false belief we need to step away from.

And perhaps most important of all, that we live in world that is itself a living, dynamic whole with it’s own soul, intelligence and mind. There is no duality, we cannot separate ourselves from nature however much we may want to.

The space, this place is where I will explore these and many other questions over the coming months and years, and I hope you will join me and a thriving community of critical thinkers who explore what it really means to live within this paradigm we call ‘reality’.

Need something more?

If you’ve found my route to and through blogging interesting and are interested in starting or developing your own, why not read my posts about How to be a Rockstar Blogger here: https://lindaph.co.uk/tag/rockstar-blogger/