Some News: Going Back to My (Blogging) Roots

Hello! Well, 2025 is off to quite a start, huh? Like many of you, 2025 has already brought up for me some complicated thoughts about social media. I didn’t watch the inauguration this week – barf! – but I saw some photos and I couldn’t not notice the oligarchy in the front row – those digital commerce and social media bros who are ruining our society with their gross collective off-the-chart greed. I couldn’t not think about my own involvement or indirect support of the oligarchy – my Amazon prime membership and many Amazon purchases over the years, my meta accounts, and the way I make money through the traffic meta sends me. It’s complicated!

Like many of you (I suspect), I am grappling with my social media behavior – thinking about what platforms are the most “problematic” because of who owns them or how awful the other users are, whether I should quit social media completely or just limit my use and dependency on them. I wonder about what effect social media is having on our culture, our democracy, and our ability to connect, communicate, and organize, to say nothing of its impact on our mental health. As I said, it’s complicated!
The truth is that all the platforms are owned by problematic people. Or at least most of them are. Maybe BlueSky isn’t? I haven’t really looked into that one and in the few minutes I’ve spent perusing the platform, I found it very boring. My favorite one these days – or the one where I find myself wasting the most amount of time – is Threads. But I will always love Instagram stories, too! And Facebook? I thought I was over Facebook until last year when it helped me reach my most lucrative year to date.

I got my 1099 this morning and for the first time in our marriage, I out-earned my husband and it’s all because the Facebook algorithm was shining on me. I post Dear Wendy columns – some of them new, but many up to 14 years old! – to my DW Facebook page every day and the algorithm shows them to hundreds of thousands of people and those people follow the links to this here website where my ad network has, as you have likely noticed, filled the site with ads and those ads helped my family buy a new roof last year, go on vacation, and buy those expensive eggs that apparently cost us our democracy. Or maybe you could say it was social media that cost us our democracy. It’s complicated.

I will forever be grateful for the positive things social media has given us, including the ability for many of us to make a living. I’m especially grateful on behalf of those of us who might not otherwise have the connections, the appropriate skills, the physical ability, the family structure, or even the neurotypical brains to be as successful in more traditional career paths. But I am not blind to the enormous societal cost of social media. And so I go back and forth and back and forth on how I want to use social media going forward. And then I think, maybe I should just blog about this.

Remember blogging? I kind of miss it. Way back, over twenty years ago I started my first blog – City Wendy in the Windy City. I wrote about my life as a young single woman living in Chicago and it was so much fun. And then I moved to New York and got married and started getting paid to blog and then eventually paid to write an advice column. And then, on this day – January 24th – 2011, I launched this site and I pretty much quit personal blogging. For a while, I still wrote occasional personal essays here but eventually I stopped doing that too and this site became nearly 100% advice columns. And now, all these years later, I find myself wanting to get back to my roots, back to old-school blogging.

So, here I am. I guess this is my official announcement that starting next week, I am going to aim to post weekly – although it might be more like every two weeks, we’ll see – posts about stuff that’s on my mind. I have a lot on my mind these days: the state of our collapsing society, the need for a revolution, perimenopause and being a middle-aged woman in the 2020s, what covid did to our brains and immune systems, losing family members to rightwing propaganda, losing our mainstream news sources to the oligarchy, what astrology says about these times we’re in, parenting through these times we’re in and how I can’t believe I’ll have a high schooler in the fall, and more!

If you think this might be of interest to you, I hope you’ll read what I have to say. I know no one randomly just goes to websites anymore so I will try to figure out a way for you to subscribe and I might cross-post to SubStack and I’ll post links on my IG account and maybe to my DW Facebook account. I’ll still post occasional advice columns here if I ever get any letters that inspire something from me other than dread. The forums will remain as they are, so please feel free to post and engage in letters for advice there as well.
I have missed writing just to write and connect. When you try to monetize something you enjoy, as I have here for 14 years to the day, it changes your relationship to that thing. I miss writing for the fun of it, for the self-expression, for the way it helps me process my thoughts. I feel like I lost my voice along the way too, and I hope to find it again. I hope you’ll follow along.