The Five Year Plan

I know tomorrow is my five year anniversary of doing this and I’ve had to make a few changes.  I started this without any kind of plan and really had no idea if anyone would even read the stuff I was writing.  And I kind of foolishly believed nobody would take the time to try and figure out who I was.  After all, I’m just some random guy writing about life with a focus on my experiences with ballroom.

So I get a little real and raw in places.  Life stirs up stuff and I didn’t have an outlet and this was the perfect place to vent.  But instead of just being a random voice in the dark, I made some connections to people.  That eventually lead to the Ballroom Village and I started to focus more on ballroom and the turbulence it created in my life.

At it’s peak, the village was a little boom town where we liked and commented on posts.  It was really a great experience to read another post that could have come from your own head.  It meant you weren’t alone.  It meant that others were going through the same thoughts and feelings.  There was support and it was great.

But, like those old west mining towns, the silver ran out and people started to leave the village.  Some left us with a goodbye to say they were moving on.  Others just left their sites abandoned with their last post frozen in time.  Soon, there were just a handful of us doing this.  As we know, the only constant in life is change so this is not unexpected. Life happens and priorities changes and keeping up with dancing and writing is a chore.  But, rather than leave a bunch of links to ghost sites, I’ve decided to take down the village from my site.

One of the problems in doing a blog like this is that you are writing about real life and real people.  It gave me some freedom to say things that I wasn’t comfortable but it also meant I tended to react the latest thing and some of those posts weren’t totally favorable.  The very first time someone figured out my secret identity, I panicked and almost took the site down.  But, since it lead to a good experience, I calmed down and kept things up.

And doing this blog has also connected me to people I would never meet in my normal life.  Even people who don’t dance like my friend in Texas with her interesting stories about building her new house.  I’ve also gotten random likes and ended up linking to other interesting blogs.  It all seemed so good and harmless.

I guess when you put your life out there, you are going to run across people who don’t agree with your decisions.  But I just figured those people who stop reading and move on.  Sadly, that hasn’t been the case with the one person who seemed to take it personally when I left Studio B and has been reminding me periodically of how stupid I am to stay at the Famous Franchise.

Until last night, I was fine with simply ignoring this person and hoping they would go away.  Then, they read through many of my old posts and then started telling me all the things they guessed about my personal life from the clues in those posts.  Because I have no idea what their game is, this seems a bit creepy to me.

I debated whether to take the blog down and I may still do that.  For now, I’ve basically made 95% of it private.  Perhaps it is just vanity but I didn’t want to wipe out the last five years of my life.  It was a little bizarre going through the history in reverse order because I knew when big events were coming up.

As I said, I’m unclear on the future.  I think I can make posts password protected and then maybe figure out a way to get passwords to those who I trust.  I could change the tone and do more general “life observation” posts and just make all the dance ones private.  Not sure what the right option is at this time.