The Willingness to Expand - Organically.

My blog is not a fancy blog. But it's my blog, and it's a good blog. It's had almost 30,000 views as of today. I'm proud of my blog. It's pretty, and it's chock full of good stuff.

I've had this blog for eight years. I'm almost 39 years old, so I've maintained this blog for almost 21% of the time I've spent on earth. In that time I've read countless books (185 were reviewed here) and explored topics that mean so much to me.

I started The Ardent Reader after my second child was born. I had part time job in a nonprofit and I had extra time every afternoon after work to read. I was married then, I drove a minivan, and I had a dog. That seems like such a long time ago.

For me, this blog is so much more than being about reading. Reading is, of course, important, but when I realized what reading could do for me as a mother, a professional, a woman, this blog changed. It has become something else: evidence of my own deliberate cultivation of myself. I went from a young mother with an newly-earned associate's degree and half decent writing talent to an educated professional writer with two kids both on the path to excellence themselves.

I learned that in all things, I strive to be genuine. The practice of blogging has helped to reveal this particular aspect of my personality. It helped me realize I don't want to compromise my strongest held values, and it led to some of the hardest life choices I ever had to make. Here's a blog post called Living an Authentic Life, which I posted on my shorter-term blog, My Ten Bucks. 

A week or so ago, news broke that Russian hackers had used people's nationalism coupled with their own ignorance to divide us and undermine the validity of our elections. Twitter cut thousands of "bot" accounts overnight, and some folks lost thousands of followers in the process. And that night, I didn't lose a single one. In fact, I gained a few. For me, this was evidence that by cultivating this blog and my Twitter following slowly and organically, I had hit the right people. Real people.

Maybe I don't have thousands of followers on my blog but I know the ones I do have are people I want to have on my team. I want you to know how much you mean to me, dear reader, and that I appreciate your continued readership.

Thanks.

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