Yeah, pretty much self-explanatory.  This blog is now closed.  I'll only be posting comments here, the tagboard or the last post to tie up loose ends, and I expect to be out of the blogosphere by the end of the week.

This isn't a last minute decision but something I've considered for weeks, even months.  For a long while now, my heart simply hasn't been in it.  I had a long chat with KTM over it and he reminded me at the end of the day to ask myself - what am I doing this for? And more often than not these days I find myself unable to answer that question.

Once I did this because I wanted to make others aware, to encourage public discourse, to help people think.  Today, I don't feel like you all need any help from me in that department.  I've seen the blogosphere boom, and there are hundreds and hundreds of bloggers who now post insightfully, astutely and with thought and passion.  The good, the bad and the ugly have all crowded their way into the blogosphere, and I can see this in my readers -- more and more of the latter, perhaps.  Most recently some have taken to being impostors, posting under my name.  Others accuse me of posting under another name.  Then of course, the name-callers and hecklers have never gone away.  All this is going on when my identity is public.  It puts me in a vulnerable position and makes it almost personal.  And so the more I write, these days, the less I feel I'm helping others, and the more I feel I'm hurting myself.

Once, also, I wrote because I had something to say.  I stumbled into blogging with passion behind my words.  I wrote because I had to write, I couldn't be torn away from my laptop when I was in the middle of an article, I would be composing posts in my head in class, stopping by the computer lab during lunch breaks.  These days, I feel physically sick when I visit my own blog.  Do I still have something to say? Yes, plenty of things.  But I might say them anonymously now, perhaps on some other blog in the future, under some pseudonym.  Now I realise the benefits of using a pseudonym; not because of fear of being prosecuted, not so you can say things and 'hide' behind the name, but because when you use a pseudonym, there's just so few other distractions.  You can be judged more on what you say, less on why you say it, who you are to say it, etc.  You will still be judged, of course, but you can afford to have it matter less.

My closest friends know I've struggled with this decision for a long time, and I've been deferred from making it by their encouragement.  But I'm afraid it really is time to hang up my keyboard.  I have other meaningful things to concentrate on, things which are in some ways more rewarding, like coaching my debate kids and seeing them through tournament season.  Leaving will be difficult -- even writing this post has been difficult -- and I know clicking the 'Publish' button now will be tough.  But I think at the end of the day, this really is the right thing to do.

So thank you for your time, and for the 21 months of my blogging career that have been the craziest of my life (particularly the last 8 of them).  God Bless.

Regards,
Gayle