the end

I've put my readers through a lot. This blog has been in a four-month state of unrest.

This has been my playground. I've used it to play with Illustrator, Photoshop and creative writing. I've been trying to figure out what makes blogs work: what drives followers, what is absolutely essential. I've tried to find my "topic," my hook, my theme. This was what felt necessary.

In the process, I lost focus and was distracted from why this blog was originally started: For my life, I've felt like what is really necessary is simply writing. I need it. I've tried to bend it around things and find what I should be writing about, which is never how this whole thing should work.

So this is what's happening. I am ending this blog. I am continuing lafrancofile, because that is where I feel at home. When I realized that was the direction I wanted to take (and needed to take if I wanted to develop a blog that people truly enjoy following), I also realized that it was where I was really writing.

La Francofile addresses what's most important to me right now: figuring out how to be married and be a woman in today's world, what it means to balance domesticity with gender equality, how to separate learning things for myself and learning them because it is what is expected.

Joe and I will be married and in Nancy in only three months. We will be living our environmentalist tendencies at full speed, learning how to keep things alive (working our way up to children), figuring out who does the laundry & who does the home repairs, communicating in another language and spending every day together... something that we haven't done. Ever.

So, as you can see, I don't need to find a theme. I don't need to find my shtick or hobby. I don't need to sound like a "nesting" couple or a vegan cooking experiment. I just need to continue doing the things that I'm passionate about: being with my (soon-to-be) husband, cooking (now mostly French) food, learning how to do all things on my own, looking at how feminism plays out in modern society and above (almost) all writing.

Thanks for reading. Please keep doing so, and please follow lafrancofile.