Struggling to find a balance between being carefree, open, honest, and yet professional in my writing was paralyzing me. There was no writing on Dysfunctional Ever After, there was no interacting with other bloggers, there was only isolation from the blogging community — and deprivation of what I love, writing and being in relation with others.

While I feel comfortable saying that everyone I currently work with knows the truly obnoxious yet intelligent person I am, I was so terrified of a potential employer finding my blog and dismissing me because of a few blog posts I wrote on my own time (and likely in the middle of the night). I work in a business that’s small and always changing. It’s totally normal to skip from job to job every year or two, so it’s wise to treat everyone you speak with as a future employer or employee. It’s my job to know what I’m doing, it’s my job to tell others what they should do, it’s my job to be put together, and sometimes it’s my job to sell people. So first and foremost, I need to be able to sell myself. And how could I do that if my blog post about Kourtney Kardashian was their first impression? I couldn’t. So I said bucket.

Today I signed on to my blog and saw that sometime in the last month I hit a million page views. It might not seem like a lot to some people, but one million page views on a blog I really hadn’t put any effort into the last three years (and only had about 400 blog posts published) seems like a lot to me.

And that is exactly when I said bucket.

I deleted every single blog post. Pictures have been removed, links deleted, and words erased. That might sound like I’m running away from something, or I’m ashamed of what I’ve written in the past. I’m not. What deleting those posts does for me is it gives me the opportunity to rebrand myself in this small space. It allows me to reevaluate what personally identifying information I share on here. (For example, old posts included a link to my personal twitter account. Not anymore.) My last name won’t be included in new posts, unlike some previous ones. This creates what I see as a safer space. No matter how cheesy that sounds, that’s exactly what this means to me. Dysfunctional Ever After was created to be a safe place for me, and I want it to go back to that.

The most trying part of adulthood is balance. Balance between what I love, who I am, and what the world says I should love, and who the world says I should be. Balance between being true to myself, and true to the world I’ve decided to live in. I’ve never been graceful. I’ve never been careful enough to do a balancing act. But I’m trying.