Oh hello. It’s me again, the Midlife Second Wife and Celebrity Dog Whisperer. (I promise to explain that designation in an upcoming post.) I wanted to let you know that an edited version of “The ‘L’ Word” has been published on KatieCouric.com as “Learning to Love Again.” If you have the time, I hope you’ll check it out. If you like what you read, by all means join the conversation and leave a comment on the thread. Or share it on your Facebook page or Twitter feed. If you don’t care for it all that much, that’s all right, too. All I ask is that you lift your hands slowly and carefully up from the keyboard. That’s it. Now stand—nice and easy. Turn around. Walk away from the computer. Go fix yourself a snack or something.
Did you have a chance to see the absolutely breathtaking Susan Sarandon on the program? It was a fascinating conversation about relationships and finding love after a divorce or breakup, and covered topics such as commitment, what it’s like for older women to date younger men, and ping-pong. (In addition to being an acting legend, Sarandon is something of an entrepreneuse; she’s co-owner of SPiN— a ping-pong social club in Manhattan with locations in Toronto, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee.)
I’m just glad that all I had to do for the show was be in the audience and send out live tweets. Having me up there playing ping-pong would not have made for good television.
Having seen the program twice now, I’ve come to the conclusion that the ping-pong segment is an apt metaphor for relationships. What do you think?
One final note: the segment featuring Dr. Terri Orbuch, the “Love Doctor,” was bumped in order to preview last night’s presidential debate. As soon as I receive word about a new air date I’ll let you know. If you’re on Twitter, I was live tweeting during the broadcast. You can find the tweets at [hashtag]katie or via my handle, [at]midlife2wife. A couple of my tweets are also featured on the show’s website.
NOTE: KatieCouric.com published an edited version of this post as “Learning to Love Again” on Monday, Oct. 22, 2012.
As many magazine articles, advice columnists, and situation comedies will tell you, it’s tricky being the first person in a relationship to say, “I love you.” Remember George Costanza? George was left holding what Jerry Seinfeld called a “pretty big matzo ball” because he failed to receive the much coveted “I love you return.” But what’s funny on television is actually quite terrifying in real life. It takes a huge leap of faith and nerves of titanium to say the “L” word first.
Take that terror to the tenth power if you’re divorced.
I know whereof I speak. After 26 years of marriage, my first husband and I divorced. Fast-forward six years, and I meet him. You know, The One. But let’s digress a moment, because playing with these numbers has given me an epiphany.
When I met The One, I was one year shy of my seven-year cellular renewal cycle—you know, that “Aha! Moment” your body supposedly has when all of its cells slough away, leaving you with an almost brand-new self. In truth, as Nicholas Wade wrote in a New York Times science articleseven years ago, some cells—“the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart”— remain unchanged. Now that’s what I call something of great constancy. The cellular structures of the brain, the eye, and the heart—three essential components in registering romantic love, if you ask me—remain constant. The cells in the rest of our bodies hit the refresh key, as it were.
Interesting. But the brain, eye, and heart theory didn’t pass the constancy test in my first marriage, I’m sad to say.
Then again, you never know. I like the idea of considering, given multiples of seven, that perhaps anything is possible. Believe me, I have mapped this out. I was married at 21 and divorced at 47. (Okay, so I’m a year or two off.) But everything did seem possible when I met The One, skipping along as I was toward my next seven-year cycle of renewal. The One and I had a lot in common: we made each other laugh, we sang lyrics from the Great American Songbook while cleaning up the kitchen after cooking together, and the attraction we felt toward one another left us in awe.
And then, two-and-a-half months into the relationship, it happened.
I did it. I’m the one who said it. After a hesitant sigh, he replied, as gently as he could, “I’m sorry. I’m just not there yet.”
Talk about your matzo balls. I could have opened a deli.
“Forget it,” I countered hastily. “I shouldn’t have said it. I understand what you’re saying/feeling/thinking.” (I was trying to fill in as many blanks as I could to cover myself.) “It’s all right.”
I wanted to believe that his reaction stemmed from emotional baggage. Our arms were filled with it. His divorce, however, was more recent than mine. I had reached the point where my baggage, as Dr. Terri Orbuch (The Love Doctor) says, could fit in the overhead compartment. Him? Not so much. He needed a skycap.
Or maybe it was something else. Maybe (Heaven forefend!) it was a case of “he’s just not that into you.”
And so he left, leaving me to wonder if I’d blown it. How could I have misread the signals? Everything pointed to love. All of the signs were there: the caring, the fondness, the intimacy, the long, meaningful conversations, the seeming trust, the genuine enjoyment in just being together. If that’s not love, what is?
I decided I wasn’t going to let this get to me. I was happy, he was happy. (He was, wasn’t he?) We had a date for the following evening; in fact, we had several events lined up into the next month. I wasn’t about to bring it up again.
Until one day I did.
“I blank you.”
“What?”
“I said ‘I blank you.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It can mean whatever you’d like it to mean. Fill in the blank. For my part, I know what it means but I’m not telling you. More cake?”
He laughed, and that was that. We were back on an even keel. “I blank you” became a running joke between us. He even started saying it to me.
The weeks flew by. Before I knew it, October was here, the month containing the second most dreaded Hallmark holiday (after Valentine’s Day) for single people: Sweetest Day.
I remember the scene as though it were yesterday. I had cooked dinner, something from my collection of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. I bought him a maroon hooded Oberlin sweatshirt, not because he went to Oberlin, but because I did. I still lived in that quaint college town, and he loved its cultural vibe as much as I did. I wrapped the gift and bought a card. I presented both to him with a flourish. Here’s the card:
After he finished laughing, he became quiet. He looked at me across the table and said, “Marci, I’m not saying this because it’s Sweetest Day. I don’t “blank” you anymore. That’s silly. I love you.”
There it was. Four months after meeting him on Match.com, he told me he loved me. The matzo ball dissolved.
Four years after that first sweetest day together, we’re still celebrating. We’ve been married for two years. At the risk of tempting fate, by our seventh wedding anniversary, I fully expect the constancy theory to hold—my heart, my head, and my eyes will see what I’m seeing right now: He’s The One.
The elegant set of ‘Katie.’ The show is taped at ABC Studios in New York and syndicated across the United States.
(MONDAY, OCT. 22, 2012)—UPDATE: I learned late last night that the segment featuring Dr. Terri Orbuch has been postponed and will be rescheduled. When the producers announce a new air date I will let you know. Hope you can tune in to watch Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon speak with Katie Couric and see both women engage in a bit of competitive sport!
The call came on a Monday in August, about a week after I had returned home to Richmond following the BlogHer conference in New York City. On the line was Brittany Jones-Cooper, a producer of Katie, Katie Couric’s new syndicated daytime talk show.
She and Couric had been at the BlogHer conference—Couric was featured in one of several keynote interviews, engaging in a lively discussion with BlogHer cofounder Lisa Stone, and issuing a clarion call for bloggers to participate in her new show. The television legend certainly came to the right place!
And, it would seem, so did I.
Back to that phone call. Couric’s producer had seen my blog, liked what I wrote, and asked if I could be in ABC Studios in New York on Thursday for a taping. Couric has employed several ingenious methods of integrating social media into her program; one way is to have two bloggers in the audience for each show. The theme of this particular program would be divorce.
Now as we all know, I happen to know a little bit about that subject.
And so it was that three days later, my husband John, who grew up about 20 minutes outside of the city, drove me into Manhattan. A bonus of the trip? We’d take some time to explore all of the landmarks of his youth—something I’d wanted to do ever since meeting him.
What a whirlwind! Just arrived backstage at the ABC Studios, still wearing my traveling clothes. TMSW got dressed and made up in record time!
I’m in the cobalt blue jacket, wearing a necklace and an Apple MacBook Pro. At my right is blogger Deesha Philyaw, of ‘Co-Parenting 101.’
You’re reading about all of this now because the program I was invited to attend airs on Monday, Oct. 22, at 3 p.m.on NBC12 in the Richmond market. You’ll want to visit the Katie website to check your local listings; in some markets the program airs at 2 p.m.
Katie Couric chats with the audience before the taping. Check out her gorgeous shoes!
The featured guest? One of my favorite actresses—the smart, sultry, simply ageless Susan Sarandon—as admired for her social activism as she is for her award-winning performances. Single after a long-term partnership with actor Tim Robbins, she turned 66 earlier this month; she shares her thoughts about commitment, relationships, and what it’s like to be an older—albeit steadily working—actress in Hollwood. Also on the show is Dr. Terri Orbuch, aka ‘the love doctor,’ offering useful marital advice—from a surprising source.
After the taping, Sarandon and her two dogs, Rigby and Penny, posed for pictures with Katie. Remind me to tell you a cute story about Rigby!
The colorfully-garbed audience of ‘Katie’
I’ll be tweeting LIVE during the broadcast beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re not already following me on Twitter, please hop over to the next window and click “follow.”
The producer also asked me to write an essay for the program’s website about finding love after divorce. (I happen to know a little something about that, too.) KatieCouric.com published “Learning to Love Again” on Oct. 22, 2012. The post appears as “The ‘L’ Word” on this blog.
I hope you’ll have a chance to tune in or follow my LIVE tweets during the broadcast. Enjoy! And as always, thanks for reading!
The recipes in this book are delicious and fun to prepare.
Isn’t it nice to start off a Monday with some good news? I’m ducking in very quickly to announce the winner of my giveaway. Congratulations to Mindy Trotta of Cambridge, Massachusetts! Your free copy of The Digest Diet, by Liz Vaccariello, will be departing the post office here in Richmond sometime this week. Watch that mailbox!
My thanks to all those who left comments on my blog post about the diet.
And in case you were wondering….I’ve kept all the weight off, even though I’ve reintroduced things I kind of missed—cream in my coffee, for example. But I’ll tell you something: I simply cannot eat the way I used to—don’t have the taste for it. And as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”
Readers, I come from Elyria, Ohio. When I first ran across this passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene II), as an English literature major at Oberlin College—15 miles (give or take) southwest of Elyria—I smiled to myself. How, I thought, could Shakespeare possibly have known that, in truth, there’s really not that much to do in ‘Illyria.’
Aye, there’s the rub.
Elyria, like so many neighboring towns in Northeast Ohio—including that metropolis to the east, Cleveland—has experienced more than its share of brain drain. Not that I’m such an Einstein, but after my divorce I moved to my alma mater’s eponymous town. I had gone to school at Oberlin and by then had worked at the college for ten years. My diaspora-of-one was not just to save myself a 15-minute commute twice each day; it was to live my life in a community of like-minded people, with steps-away access to internationally renowned concerts and lectures, where I no longer felt as though I were a stranger in a strange land. What a thing to say about one’s hometown! But it was true. I felt I had outgrown Elyria, although in some ways it’s quite possible it was the town that had outgrown me.
I remember when the fine arts were a lively part of life in Elyria. My mother spent—no, volunteered—countless hours selling subscription tickets to the Elyria Community Concert Association. Many backwater towns sponsored similar cultural lifelines, and Elyria was a thriving hub on the circuit. I remember seeing opera legend Leontyne Price, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher, and many others artists perform live in the auditorium of Elyria High School. Imagine that: a town without a performing arts center nevertheless brought internationally respected artists to visit.
And I remember taking the bus downtown with my mother, browsing through any number of sweet little shops that sold fashionable clothes to “the smart set,” eating at any number of mom-and-pop restaurants or soda fountains, buying chocolate cupcakes at Gartman’s Bakery. I saw the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at the old Capital Theater downtown, and bought my 45-records at Wagner’s Appliance Store. I failed to learn how to swim at the Elyria YMCA across from Ely Square. I’ve already shared with you my childhood memory of the old Elyria Public Library, pictured above. All those places are gone. The library, torn down, opened a modern, one-story facility on Washington Avenue, sometime in the late 1960s, as I recall. It’s still there, although now there’s a newer, larger, main library on the west side.
You know that a city is growing when one library isn’t enough to contain all the dreams of its readers.
Elyria was changing, and I was changing with it. All the shopping was now centered at the Midway Mall. If you didn’t drive you had to take a taxi to get there, because the buses had stopped running. All the downtown movie theaters—and at one time there were four—were shuttered. The Community Concert Association folded; people now drove south to Oberlin to satisfy their longing for culture, or north to Lorain County Community College, at the very edge of the city, where a lecture series and a performing arts series were gaining a foothold. (I actually began my college education there, and received an excellent foundation that prepared me well for Oberlin.) The point, however, is that there really wasn’t much of anything left in Elyria except for government offices, banks, and lawyers.
It made sense that as long as I was starting a new life, I might as well give myself a new city in which to start it. Oberlin was an oasis in the corn belt that rimmed the rust belt of Elyria.
I’m indulging in this reverie because today’s Sunday New York Times features a portrait of my hometown on its front page—the first in a five-part series. Dan Barry, a gifted writer and reporter for the New York Times, spent untold hours in Elyria, interviewing residents, business owners, and government officials—including my oldest and dearest friend, a woman who has remained in Elyria her entire life, never, ever giving up on it. She now serves as the city’s Safety-Service Director. Her passion for helping the city’s current administration turn the city around is inspiring. I hope that she—that they—can do it.
P.S. About the diner that serves as the lens through which Dan Barry views Elyria: After my second husband and I got our marriage licenses, in the fancy new justice center across from the square that also figures prominently in Barry’s article, we walked over to Donna’s Diner for lunch. Several members of the ‘Breakfast Club,’ also referenced in the article, were still there, lingering over their coffee. As is often the case with small towns, I knew several of them. I said hello, and introduced to them the man I was about to marry.
I wrote an essay—the first of many I will write—about my mother’s slide into the quicksand and darkness of dementia. I published it on my blog, and the editors of BlogHer honored it with a Voice of the Year Award for 2012. I’m proud of this, but not solely for the reason you might think. I’m proud of this essay because it exists, because I was able to write it at all. I managed to descend into that frightening pit of despair and start to tell my mother’s story, to return her voice to her, to leave something of her to this world that she left 12 years ago. This was not an easy thing to do, and I will have to do it again and again and again, until her story is fully told, until her voice is finally heard. It will be difficult, and I know there will be times I’ll be afraid to continue.
She was an intensely private person, but in this respect I think she would want me to keep going. She would want people to know, because, sadly, she was one among millions who have disappeared into the maw of Alzheimer’s, and who will continue to disappear until a cure can be found. Maybe if enough stories get told, if enough attention is paid, something that might be enough will be done, and the disease (the irony of my word choice isn’t lost on me) will itself become a memory. It happened with smallpox. It could happen again.
According to Alzheimer’s Disease Research, a program of the American Health Assistance Foundation, more than 5.4 million Americans are believed to have Alzheimer’s disease; by 2050, as the U.S. population ages, this number could increase to 15 million. There are nearly 36 million people living with dementia worldwide, and this number is likely to increase to more than 115 million by 2050.
The essay, “‘Have You Met My Daughter?’ My Mother, Her Alzheimer’s and Me,” is one of 80 essays representing 80 bloggers included in the Voices of the Year anthology, published by BlogHer in conjunction with Open Road Media.
The anthology will be available for download (from Amazon and iTunes) on Oct. 30, but advance orders are available now. Here’s what Amazon says about BlogHer and the book:
BlogHer is a unique media company created by women, for women, and—most importantly—with women, women like those whose voices you’ll read in this collection. Each year, BlogHer—the largest network of women who blog—hosts an initiative to identify the very best work from across the blogosphere. Submitted by the community, selected by a committee, and presented at the world’s largest blogging conference, the pieces presented here have it all because women live it all—online and off. Humor. Inspiration. Food. Family. Style. Sex. Politics. Tech. Career. Dreams. BlogHer’s Voices of the Year reminds us of the transformative power of blogs to connect us all via powerful storytelling.
My thanks to Elisa, Lisa, and Jory—the co-founders of BlogHer—for envisioning this project, and to Donna Schwartz Mills, a member of BlogHer’s conference programming team, for helping to administrate it. I’m humbled by the honor, and honored that my mother’s story will reach a wider audience.
The recipes in this book are delicious and fun to prepare.
Thanks to the good offices of Reader’s Digest, I’m happy to announce that I have a beautiful, jacketed copy of The Digest Diet to give away. Here’s how to enter:
Visit the round-up post about my Digest Diet journey and leave a positive comment. That’s your “entry form.” Just a few caveats, however:
You have to live within the contiguous United States;
There has to be a way for me to get in touch with you to notify you that you’ve won. If you’re not sure that I have your email and postal addresses, please go to the contact page (found above the masthead in the drop-down menu under ‘Who is the Midlife Second Wife?’), and send me an email with that information. (There’s no form to bother with, but that’s where you’ll find my email address.) I donotand will not share your information with any third party;
If I am unable to reach you by email to notify you that you’ve won, I will draw another name;
And of course, you need to enter by leaving a comment on the round-up Digest Diet post. (“Enter by leaving.” I like that. Think I’ll start a meme to that effect!)
I’ll pick the winner sometime this weekend, and announce it next Monday here on the blog. Good luck, everyone!
This isn’t really a diet book, in my opinion. It’s more a handbook for a healthy way to eat.
Yes, I did it! I reached my implicit goal: to get my weight below 200. I now clock in at 199 pounds 8 ounces, for a grand total loss of 9 pounds 6 ounces. Yay me! Yay Digest Diet! Let’s recap, shall we?
I started the Digest Diet three weeks ago, weighing in at 209 pounds 4 ounces. I’m a 56-year-young thyroid cancer survivor with a job where I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer in my home office. If you were paying careful attention, you can count three significant factors in that previous sentence: age, the loss of the body’s metabolism regulator, and lifestyle. These factors gave rise to my weight gain over the years. My issues with weight have been pretty consistent: I’ve needed to lose a good bit of it, and I’ve lacked the proper motivation.
There’s no motivator quite like telling the world what you’re up to. I believe one reason I’ve found success on this diet is because I’ve checked in a couple of times a week—not just here, but also on the Digest Diet Twitter hashtag (#DigestDiet) and their Facebook site. The community of Digest Dieters in the blogosphere has been incredibly supportive, as have the staff at Readers’ Digest.
If you’ve been tracking my progress, you’ll recall that my explicit goal was to lose 15 pounds. Although I fell slightly more than five pounds short of that goal, I’m satisfied with my results. The big deal for me, at least psychologically, was not to see the numeral two leading off the numbers of my digital weight. I cannot tell you what this means to me. I also went down a bra size, too. (I’m not much for measuring myself—I’ve always sort of gone by how my clothes fit and look on me—so I don’t have those stats.)
But let’s take a look, shall we? Here are my before and after pictures:
After
Before
When I tell you that this is the best diet I’ve been on, these are the indices I used:
I continually lost weight. I might have plateaued a day or three, but I never reversed direction. The trajectory was down, down, down. And I hope you can tell from the photos, but the sleeve on my shirt is looser than in the first photo, the girls look more reined in, and one of my middle bulges is nearly gone.
My self-esteem trajectory was up, up, and up.
I had more energy. It was easier to take extended walks for exercise—at minimum one mile—because I didn’t get winded and my knees didn’t hurt.
My skin has more clarity.
With one or two rare exceptions, I’ve absolutely loved every recipe I’ve prepared from this book—so much so that I plan to incorporate almost everything I tried into my regular routine. And here is the answer to the second question in my headline: I’m not done. Not by a long shot. Not only do I not want to see weight creep again, I want to continue this pattern of healthy eating. And I promise to check in with you down the road to let you know if I’ve done so.
Here’s what I cooked for dinner the other evening, toward he end of the diet. My husband loved this, and so did I.
Spaghetti with Super Mushroomy Marinara
I’ll try, before the end of the week, to share the recipe for this pasta dish. Coming from someone who is half-Sicilian, you know you can trust me when I tell you that this satisfied my pasta fulfillment requirements.
Now, three minor caveats about the Digest Diet:
First, it will help enormously if you love to cook, don’t mind cooking frequently, and have access to a good market with a wide array of produce, seafood, and the occasional esoteric item, such as almond oil. Fortunately, I love to play in the kitchen and a fabulous market recently opened up within walking distance of my home, so I enjoyed pulling these recipes together. But do note that there is a time, labor, and shopping factor involved here, and this diet will require a level of commitment that must take those factors into account.
Second, I’m not sure I would have been as successful on the diet if I were working full-time away from home. The flexibility that being self-employed gives me enabled me to weave the demands of frequent cooking, shopping—and yes, eating—into my day. You’re eating five times a day on this diet, not three, so those with a different daily schedule might find it all a bit challenging. If you are willing to be more organized and dedicated, you’ll do fine. Trust me. Two days into this you will want to keep going. When you see the results and experience how you’re starting to feel, you’ll find it’s worth spending the extra time in the kitchen and at the market.
Finally, there are no guidelines in the book about eating out in restaurants while you’re on the diet, something that my husband and I do about twice a week. (We just avoided restaurants for the duration.) I did, however, find a page on the Readers’ Digest website that addresses this issue. Perhaps a subsequent edition of the book could incorporate the great information on the website.
Last Friday I had a lunch meeting with a client, my first foray into a restaurant since starting the diet. I chose a tossed green salad with feta cheese, grilled chicken, walnuts, and cranberries in a raspberry vinaigrette. I ate some of the cranberries but felt they might have too much sugar, so I left most of them on my plate. Once you’ve been on the diet for a week or so, you’ll get a sense of what foods to avoid and what foods will help you continue to release those damn fat cells.
Would I recommend this book to someone struggling with weight? In a New York minute! I have tried so many diets throughout my lifetime, and nothing—I repeat, nothing, compares to the Digest Diet in terms of results. At no time did I feel I was starving or denying myself of something delicious to eat.
Do you believe that some things in life are just meant to be? I do. I was meant to go on this diet, right now. Here’s the sign the universe sent to tell me so. Do remember the chocolate chip/coconut/walnut cookie from my first Digest Diet post? You know, the “Royale” from Richmond’s Café Caturra? Here’s a photo to refresh your memory:
The restaurant doesn’t make this cookie anymore. They changed distributors and no longer have access to the required ingredients. Now if that’s not a sign from the gods, I don’t know what is.
The founder of the social media consultancy Digital Royalty has a new book out tomorrow, Oct. 2. On Sunday she was a guest of Melissa Harris-Perry’s on MSNBC, talking with other panelists about the influence of social media on politics, and the change-agent behind the sports and social media phenomenon covered in a Forbes article. And today (winking here) she’s making her second appearance on my blog. What a whirl!
As you know, I met Amy Jo at the BlogHer 12 conference in New York City. And here I must digress to tell you that I felt an immediate bond with her when she shared her experience of finding a lump in her breast the size of a golf ball. As a survivor of thyroid cancer, I’ve become hard-wired to relate on a deeper human level with those who have either had cancer or a cancer scare. As someone I admire once said, we become members of a club no one ever wanted to join. And it’s something of a paradox, because once admitted to the club, you want to remain a member in good standing, if you know what I mean. Amy Jo’s honesty—her fearlessness—in sharing her experience speaks to the very essence of what is so intrinsically valuable about social media: honesty. Being real. Or as Amy says in her book, “showing some skin.”
So I’m sitting in the Pathfinder session, listening to Amy discuss innovation, intention, ideas, influence, and inspiration—and writing as quickly as I can to take down what she is saying: “Coloring outside the lines without crossing the lines.” Sharing the corporate mission statement of Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh: “Be real and use your best judgment.” Explaining the value of “Random Acts of Shaqness.” (You must read this book. And yes, she’s referring to Shaquille O’Neal.)
In the midst of my flurried note-taking I had an epiphany: As a blogger, I’m ipso facto on social media. But I wasn’t really on social media. It was quickly becoming apparent that I had much to learn and I’d better get cracking. And that’s why I’m reading her excellent book, and why I want to tell you about it. I think that it’s a game changer for any public persona, corporation, brand, organization, or entity not yet on board with the new rules of the game. For those already using social media to enhance their relevancy, it will provide an entertaining and enlightening overview of where they have been. I suspect even they will learn things they didn’t already know.
On paper (in pixels?) it doesn’t seem as though I’d be such a social media newbie. I began writing content for Web 1.0 back in 1998 on behalf of Oberlin College. I was wired in for the advent of email, and only just slightly behind the curve on Facebook and LinkedIn, although I caught up fairly quickly. I did a bit of blogging and video interviews, and even composed tweets during our 2.0 phase. And yet I hovered there. It wasn’t until starting my own blog in August 2011 that I truly recognized the importance of communicating regularly and with intention across diverse social media platforms. I’m sure one reason is because I’m now working for myself, and so I feel a sense of urgency. But I am also a writer who blogs. And like every other writer who blogs, I want people to read me. How does a blogger find readers? On social media. Duh.
And so I advanced on the board from Facebook and LinkedIn until I reached Twitter. I opened my own account (kind of feeling the way I did when I first opened a checking account); passed “Go,” and in a year attracted more than 400 followers. (This is more than double what I had before the BlogHer conference, which shows you how much I learned in a very short time). These past weeks I’ve slowly begun to build my presence on Pinterest and Google+. This weekend I wrote my bio for Huffington Post and figured out how to upload a video to YouTube and connect it to what you’re reading now. Just today I sent out my first Instagram. (It’s fitting, on many levels, that it was a photo of Amy Jo’s appearance on the Melissa Harris-Perry show.)
@AmyJoMartin discussing social media & politics on @MSNBC’s @MHPerry #TeamRenegades http://instagr.am/p/QNA_tOSDze/ (Amy Jo is on the left.)
When you start a blog, and hope for it to be meaningful and authentic and actually read by people, it soon becomes apparent that it’s not enough just to hit “publish.” Bloggers control their own distribution. Those who take what they do seriously are not just members of the media, they are also the means of the media—the studios and the control rooms and the printing presses and the distribution houses. It’s exhausting, quite frankly—especially if you’re a team of one. Even a renegade team of one. Even a renegade team of one with an awesome husband to help with things like shooting the video you’re about to see.
This is why Amy Jo’s book is important to me. As a team of one, I have to think about economies of scale. If I spend three hours writing a blog post and only 30 people see it, I’ve just poured four minutes of my life for each of those 30 people. If 300 people see it, I’m starting to get some traction and make some impact for the time I’ve invested. If 3,000 people see it, well, you can do the math. The greatest impression one of my post’s has had was last November, when WordPress featured an essay of mine on ‘Freshly Pressed’ and more than 5,000 people read it over a two-day period. That truly felt relevant. That’s what a writer hopes for.
Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here. Every one of my readers is valuable to me. Whether 30 people visit a post or 3,000—each reader means something to me. Each has invested his or her own time in reading what I had to write. Economies of scale work both ways, after all. That’s why I hope I’m providing interesting, informative, and entertaining content for you.
Time is money, as they say. And I’m as busy as the next person—I also run a business and freelance. So these things inevitably begin to matter, especially if your blog is part of the foundation of your livelihood.
Amy Jo learned something early on about the time factor, and she has shared the anecdote widely—in a TEDx talk, at conferences, and in her book. Her former boss, who wasn’t wild about all of this social media business, challenged her by sliding a sheet of paper across her desk. On it were written three words:
Work. Family. Self.
“Choose,” her boss told her. “You can’t have all three.”
Since Amy ultimately left that employer and formed her own business, I naturally wondered if she ever did have to end up choosing. I asked her about it, and she replied via email:
“Since founding Digital Royalty a few years ago, I have been able to design my own day, whether that means working late at night while on the elliptical machine, or taking a conference call from a mountaintop. Through creating Digital Royalty, and especially Digital Royalty University, I have been able to find my Royal Bliss. That’s what balance is to me. It’s not a perfect equilibrium. It’s finding that sweet spot, where your purpose, passion, and skill collide.”
I love that, don’t you? The “sweet spot where purpose, passion, and skill collide.” That’s what balance is. And now, before this post gets too unbalanced by growing too long, I think it’s time to let everyone know who won a signed galley copy of Amy Jo’s book. Watch this video to find out!
A note about the contest: The winner was drawn from the Facebook fans of The Midlife Second Wife. A drawing held Friday evening, Sept. 28, did not yield a winner because I was unable to reach the person whose name was drawn despite two attempts via Facebook. A subsequent drawing, represented in the above video, was held Sunday afternoon, Sept. 30. Out of fairness to my fans, members of my family were excluded from this drawing. I should also note that I received a signed galley copy of Renegades Write the Rules for the giveaway, as well as a free download for my Kindle. Other than that, I received no compensation to write about the book.
If you would like to like the Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, click the embedded link at the start of this note. You can also follow me on Twitter: @midlife2wife. Thank you for your support!
The Midlife Second Wife ™ 