You are about to read my last blog entry until August. That’s right. No more Thursday publication of Eric Lagergren’s musings and anecdotes of his life lived with Type 1 diabetes. At least for a while.
I’ll be taking a break from diabetes blogging for two months.
Why?
For the past three years I’ve been writing a weekly entry about living with diabetes. I’ve enjoyed the process, the introspection, and the perspective the act of writing most of the entries has given me. I’ve also enjoyed the interactions with readers of this blog. Your suggestions, your comments, and sometimes your disagreements with me have shown me that there’s an audience for my less-than-1000-word entries I type up and submit to Diabetes Self-Management.
I like that.
Yet with all that’s been going on these past six months in the nondiabetes realm, I’ve felt as if I was reaching and grasping when coming up with topics to write about each week.
Why?
For those of you who don’t know what’s been going on, I’ll simply say that I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma in late 2009; I had a thyroidectomy in January, the follow-up radioactive iodine treatment, and everything is now taken care of and I’m cancer free. (Any perusal of my blog entries in 2010 — especially entries from January — will provide you with more information on the cancer, if you’re so inclined.)
With the cancer and all that fighting it entailed, sitting down weekly to write diabetes-related material became somewhat of a ho-hum and rote task, even if I tried to write about diabetes as it related to the cancer treatments. When faced with the cancer on a daily basis, the diabetes life was boring. Can you believe that?
I was cool, for a while, with trying to overlap the content, especially when the two medical maladies in my life did overlap. It was nice to write about the cancer, too; writing about it for the blog provided the same introspection for dealing with the thyroid cancer that I’d previously discovered in writing about my diabetes.
Lately, though — the past month or so — I’ve been forcing it. So, a couple of weeks ago I realized that because I’m not writing this blog for my livelihood, and because no one’s forcing me to do it, and because it should be a joy to write these entries and not reason to stress out and worry that I’m doing readers a disservice by stretching the same tired topic too thin when I rehash what I’ve written about too much before…
Well, because of that, I’m going to step away from the blog and recharge for a couple of months. I’m going to keep some notes when I feel like it. I’m going to think about what I may want to begin with when I return in August. But I’m going to enjoy my time away.
I’ll be ready return to writing when my hiatus is over.
But wait!
Before I sign off, can I ask those of you who’ve read my blog in the past to do one thing for me? OK, I hope this doesn’t feel like an assignment, because it isn’t (and now that I’m typing this I realize I’ll probably only get one or two responses at most. Oh how full of paranoia I can be….)
Here: Either in the comments section for this entry or via a message to me that will not appear in this blog, please leave a note to let me know what it is you like about reading my entries and why you’re drawn to reading this weekly blog — if, of course, you’re a weekly reader.
I’m a feedback kind of guy, and in my down time I’ll take suggestions into consideration for when I return.
If you wish to comment, do so below. If you wish to send an e-mail, please click here and put “Note to Eric” in the subject line.
Thanks. Enjoy your summer! See you in August.