My Life As A Blog Guest Post By …

Blogger: Natalie Holbrook

Blog: Nat The Fat Rat 

Twitter: @natthefatrat

My life as a blogger began in Brooklyn one warm September afternoon, after I had narrowly (and quite bravely, it must be said) survived a very ridiculous shopping trip to the Brooklyn Target. I had come home, sweaty and exhausted from having hauled an entire SUV’s worth of Target goodies using just the arms God gave me (plus the subways God gave NYC), inspected my arms for plastic baggie bruises, and then thought to myself, You know, this would make a really stupid blog post. (A thought that, thankfully, still occurs to me almost daily!)

My mom had been urging me to start a blog for months. At the time I had just moved to New York City with my husband, had way too much spare time at my boring office job, and had way too many ridiculously detailed stories for my poor mother’s beleaguered ears. “I have to run and get Blake from school,” she’d say, cutting me off during our phone calls. “You should really start a blog and write all this down!”

That afternoon, with too silly of a story to pass up sitting in my lap, I started my blog. From there on out, I had a captive audience: my computer screen. My computer screen never told me to slow down or sum it up. It never got bored with me. It never told me it had to run to pick up Blake! My computer screen was my biggest fan. I told no one about my blog. Okay, I told my husband, under strict orders that hewas to tell no one. For a few years my blog was my secret lover, where I’d write about all the small, often unimportant, but unendingly lovely things that made me happy. I figured nobody would understand it (how self-absorbed! a blog!) and I just knew I’d die a thousand deaths if anyone I knew were to read it.

Later that year my husband got accepted to a law school in the smallest, most remote town in all of America. (When I told coworkers I was moving to Idaho they said, “You mean Ohio?” because that’s as far west as most New Yorkers are aware of.) Moving to Idaho completely derailed me. Nothing interesting happened to me anymore. Without the city to inspire me I felt flat and defeated. My new job was a horrific exercise in all of the different methods of soul sucking. I started to feel adrift, confused, depressed, and pointless. I was trying to get pregnant and even my uterus was bored with me. Nothing was good.

One day, while commiserating about how pathetic our lives were, a friend recommended I read a blog written by one of her good friends. Cjanerun.com, she said. I obeyed, and my life changed forever. Single-handedly, Courtney pulled me out of my funk. Her outlook on life and on our shared faith was completely refreshing. And then one day I said to myself, “Self, this isn’t brain surgery.” She was looking for good things and she found them. It was high time for me to do the same.

I gave myself a week, a sort of experiment. I’d look for the good things and invite God into my life more fully, and then write about it at my poor neglected blog lover. Not even three hours into my little experiment and it was like my whole world had been blown open. There was so much happiness to be found, everywhere! What had I been missing? It was the best thing I ever did for myself.

It was . . . a blog.

And in that spirit, that spirit of uplifting and maybe hopefully passing on what Courtney had done for me, I started to tell people about my blog. I started to blog on purpose.

And that, in a nutshell, is how blogging (blogging!) changed my life.

I hope you enjoyed Natalie’s post, which is part of an on-going series on Blogstar. If you would like to contribute your own My Life As A Blog post, please email me at sbrydenbrown[at]gmail[dot]com.