There are some compromises I just won't make.
I thought my blog was pretty ok, maybe even lovely, up until I started taking a web page designing class this term. For a week now I have tried to write and loathed the interface, the plainness of the background, the colors and fonts and setup that only seven days ago I took no issue with. I decided to overhaul. Like many things in life, sometimes you come to a point where you just have to smash things. Tear apart your house and remodel it! Throw away all the junk in your closet! Crumple up that draft and start again! It's a kind of purging I think everybody experiences at least once in their lives. A restlessness we probably inherited from generations past of nomads who wandered the globe, uprooting everything familiar to try to survive anew.
I embraced that ancient side of me today and re-created my blog, going through and deleting or re-arranging some of the old posts and updating everything I could. But that is only the surface. I also want to start changing the content. For two years now I have rambled on here about various issues, experiences, school assignments and frustrations that were personally important to ME and me alone. I want to still write the occasional personal post, but I will strive to not be so shallow the next time. If I'm going to write about the hard stuff, might as well go deep. The rest of my posts I'm going to try to focus on things that matter to more than just me. Things in our community, things in the world, things that just have WEIGHT.
Hopefully this transformation will be for the better, and you'll be patient with me as I try to stretch some journalistic legs.
As for the picture--I chose it purposefully. My Junior year of high school I was blessed with the opportunity to see some of Europe. This picture was taken during our last week there, during the dawning of a beautiful day on the coast of Italy. We were high up in the mountains at a hotel that was more of an old house, and for whatever reason I woke up earlier than most of our group and opened the shutters to take a look outside. This view literally took my breath away. I'm not even sure I started breathing again until I had taken as many pictures as I could of the rolling fog, the flowers, and the hills fading into each other as far as I could see.
That trip reminded me what it means to have a life and to live it. It exposed me to cultures and ideas and beauty that I could not have imagined. Four years later, I am a Junior again. And after spending two years in the dark with depression it was high time for another reminder that there is life out there, and it needs to be LIVED.
Keep strong out there world,
Sincerely,
Robyn
