At the Crossroads

I’ve been away from LatinoLikeMe for awhile now, preoccupied with work and life demands. The most overwhelming work-related demand was my book manuscript, which is now out of my hands and securely in the (prolonged) process which hopefully ends with it being published. On the personal front, I am a father of three kids and, well, that’s enough said about that.

The semi-completion of the book process (I will have to make future revisions in line with whatever feedback comes my way after the review process), has been a load off, I won’t lie. Since my first academic appointment in 2002, it was a goal–almost an obligation–I felt I needed to complete. When I arrived at my current position, at a place that not only expected me to complete it but also had the resources and support to help me do just that, it was the start of both an exciting and stressful time. Almost all the stressful part is now behind me.

One of the casualties in this final year of working on the manuscript has been my blog. Out of necessity, I had to become less regular and, at times, downright invisible. I had started LatinoLikeMe with the intent of making a lot of the academic work I do more accessible to a wider audience, an attempt to provide some small educational resource for people outside of the highly insulated and privileged world of academia. And that took a lot of time. More time than I could spare most weeks.

My absence has really helped to put blogging into perspective for me, though. As work increased, I was often only able to write shorter but more personal pieces. The early years of this blog had very little of that, since I had never intended to make this a journal comprised of my personal life. The more I did it (and I only did it in the most minor of ways, I think) the more I grew comfortable with it as part of my public life. In short, I started to become increasingly comfortable with this blog not being just an outlet for long, research-based mini-articles, but also random posts on things I like, things I had to say from the heart, or even things that had little connection to Latino issues other than for the fact that I am Chicano.

I’ve also grown to appreciate the ability to have a space to record some version of my life outside of the intimately personal stuff we record as a family (through pictures, videos, stories, etc.). The more I thought about it, the blogs I most enjoyed following we’re ones written by people (both friends and not) who had evolved to have a personal and consistent voice allowing me a sustained interaction with their lives.

And so, I think that is where I am going with this space. I suspect, like everything related to blogging, it will be a slow and gradual process. I doubt it will mean more readers, but I am sure it will mean more of me more often.

So thanks for reading, or subscribing, or randomly visiting. I hope to see you around more often.