Probably still do.

Which sounds much more exciting or dramatic ( potato, potatoe.) than it actually was.

Nama has never been a giant website. On a normal day, ten or twenty people might read something I wrote. Sometimes more. Sometimes I’m pretty sure half of those were me checking whether I screwed something up.

Then suddenly there were more than a thousand views and reads.

Someone went through the website.

All of it.

Old posts. New posts. Pages. Years of my life sitting there for anyone with enough time and apparently absolutely nothing else to do.

And yes, I know. I put it on the internet.

Still feels different when you realize someone is sitting down and consuming all of you at once.

I watched the numbers climb until I finally pulled a post down.

I changed my name on Facebook. Blocked the people I thought needed blocking. Started looking over my shoulder digitally in a way I never had before.

Then I did something very unlike me.

I shut up.

For months.

Not because I ran out of things to say.

Clearly. Have you met me?

I stopped writing because I didn’t want that person reading about me anymore.

Or my husband.

Or my kids.

Or what I was thinking, feeling, pissed about, scared of, trying to understand.

I didn’t want to give them anything else.

And that was a problem because writing is how I figure my shit out.

Sometimes badly.

Sometimes prematurely.

Sometimes I write something and six months later realize I was completely wrong.

Welcome to being a human being with a website.

These were never court filings. They were my thoughts at the exact moment I was trying to understand my own life.

My feelings. My experiences. My family’s life as I was living it and trying to make sense of it.

Then some of those words were taken out of that context and used in a way that affected my husband, me and my family.

That made me angry.

Really angry, actually.

Because I had every right to write about what was happening to me. I had every right to write about my daughter hurting. I had every right to spill my own feelings onto a page and try to understand them there.

Instead, I stopped.

I didn’t want someone wandering through my life and turning my words into something else.

And for a while, the only way I knew how to keep them out was to stop letting anyone in.

Well.

That was stupid.

Not entirely. I needed some distance. I needed to figure out what I was willing to put here knowing somebody might be reading it for reasons other than actually giving a shit about what I had to say.

But months?

Come on, Danielle.

My marriage is still mine to write about.

My health.

My body. My trauma. Getting older. Raising kids and then discovering they become adults whether you’re emotionally prepared for that bullshit or not.

My mistakes are definitely mine. I have an impressive collection.

And my feelings are mine too.

Even the messy ones.

Especially those.

People can misunderstand me. They can think I’m dramatic, inappropriate, angry, oversharing or just plain wrong.

Sometimes I am. I like it that way.

They can take something I wrote on a shitty Tuesday and try to make it mean something entirely different on Friday.

I can’t control that.

Funny thing about having a website, though.

It has tools.

I can see when ten readers suddenly becomes a thousand.

I can see when somebody goes wandering through years of my life in one sitting.

Which, honestly, is a hell of a commitment.

Someone’s having themselves a little Nama marathon.

Should I make snacks?

I should probably monetize this better.

Microlearning is big, I hear.

Anyway. I digress.

I’m done catering.

I’m not being quiet.

You knew it wouldn’t last.

I’ll think before I hit publish.

But I’m not going to erase myself because someone else made being seen feel uncomfortable.

I’m going to write.

If you’re here because you actually want to read it, welcome back.

If you’re here for other reasons?

Well.

At least click around a little.

Mama has hosting fees.