It's been a whole year since I posted here!  Wow!  But I did resume blogging through Lent at my Lenten Daily Meditations blog, and it felt good to be back at it.  So I have decided to try to revive this blog.

The problem I have always had, I realize, is that in spite of the title Candidly Susan,  I have found it difficult to be open and candid here.  It's because I have always shown a somewhat different side of myself to people in different parts of my life.  With a blog post, there's no telling which part of my life the reader might be from, so it's hard to know how to spin it.  But I'm 52 years old, for Pete's sake.  I think it's high time to re-integrate all the various parts of me, acknowledge that I am who I am, and live with a little more integrity.  You'd think by now I'd understand that I can't please all the people all the time, and give my friends and colleagues credit for being able to disagree with something I write and still like me.

The other issue with this blog was always that I have eclectic interests and I never wanted it to be just a political blog or just a mommy blog or just a book discussion blog or just any one topic.  I still feel that way, but I realize that having the whole world open as a source of topics can sometimes be less liberating than overwhelming.  In the past, I have too often defaulted to kind of using it as a public diary.  And really, my life isn't that interesting, that anyone else would want to read my diary.

So my new goal is to post two or three times a week, and to make those posts interesting as self-contained pieces.  Sometimes, I might brag about my kid or lament some home situation.  Others, I might comment on politics or culture or arts and entertainment.  No doubt I will sometimes discuss books and authors, a favorite subject of mine.  Religion is a big part of my life, so no doubt those topics will turn up, too.  But I will try to always make it more than just a diary --  an actual piece of thoughtful writing on the topic.

By the way, one of the things I have been doing in place of blogging for the past year has been becoming really active on Facebook.   I know different people have different feelings about social media, but I gotta tell you, my experiences with Facebook have been overwhelmingly positive.  In particular, I have enjoyed the ability it gives me to reconnect with people from various times in my life.  I have frequent exchanges with people from high school and from various employers and cities that were my home over the years, with whom I had lost touch.

An interesting insight that has been bubbling up for me is this:  when I was a child, my family was rather nomadic.  When I entered 9th grade, it was my 10th school.  I was a good student and always able to make friends, so I never thought it really hurt me any.  But the one legacy that peripatetic childhood did leave was that it was all too easy for me to move away from people I had loved and truly leave them behind.  Not having a rootedness in my childhood translated into not maintaining ties with people as I moved from one to another of the natural steps and moves of adulthood.  I think that's why I am finding it so rewarding to go back and renew some of those connections now, as an adult, on Facebook. 

So to anyone reading this, thank you for coming back.  I would really appreciate comments, if only because they let me know someone is reading.  Please keep checking back in.  I hope to provide something worth reading and selfishly, knowing you are coming back gives me a lot stronger motivation to write.