This blog is like a reboot. The domain has been used by me for years (thebutterflychild.blogspot.com) to blog and share my life and my mind and my ideas. It's been a faithful friend, an outlet for a ghastly amount of pent-up creative energy, and a place to pour myself out and be met with the legitimate honesty of only those who cared. Blogging seems trivial to lots of people, but to me it has been somehow filled with meaning and purpose and intent.
When I started cheating on Blogger with Tumblr I think I thought I'd magically become more artsy, since Tumblr is kind of all about artsy people and sharing highly intellectual photographs and commentaries and articles with your artsy friends, but instead I realized that I am just an awkward fit there. Despite having a fairly prominent streak of hippie in me, I'm also almost completely logical in my assessment of things. I often roll my eyes at those melodramatic hipster barista pipe-smoking types and the way their open-mindedness is often so short sighted and their intellectualism so frail. It frustrates me. I want beauty with substance, not false meaning derived from conjured up emotion.
I could prattle on for paragraphs and paragraphs about it all, but I won't, because it's not the point.
After a while, I decided my affair with Tumblr was unfulfilling and what I was really looking for the ability to have a real dialogue with people who also wanted the same things out of life-- art and music and meaning and love and growth and butterflies. Just on a practical level, Tumblr was not the place.
I decided a long time ago to dust off the Blogger and continue with that, but I went back to see those old posts and photos and I felt out of place, like I'd grown out of my own home. It was the same feeling you get when you see an old friend for the first time in years and you realizing in talking to them that neither of you have any clue who the other is anymore, and you are both trying to have a conversation with the memory of a time that doesn't exist. Reading those words from not that long ago, I felt like I'd somehow grown a hundred years and was looking back at a person who was mostly a stranger to me. It was weird and I couldn't convinced myself that it was okay to just pick up where I left off.
I'm not sure what made me feel so different from that girl. I've had some life experiences, both good and bad, that I know I grew through, but I hadn't ever felt that I'd changed so drastically. I talked the same, cared about the same things, had the same group of friends. I still can't put a finger on it exactly, but I will say that I have never been a person who looked back at the past and thought "Wow, look how far I've come!" I have never seen myself as a person who has changed tremendously over time, and in fact I usually feel that I've basically stayed the same since I was a small child, down to my favorites colors and most of my hobbies. I've mellowed out in some ways, sure, but that always seemed like it was supposed to happen eventually as you got older and turned into an adult.
As I skimmed the thoughts and habits of this other Mara from year or so ago, I realized that whether I'd noticed or not, I'd entered some new phase of life, of my metamorphosis, and I don't really know what to call it, but it's different. Maybe it's being an adult, or maybe it's just the result of some more grown-up life experiences, or maybe it's a result of my ongoing spiritual journey, or maybe I'm just being a drama queen. In any case, it was clear that while I still felt very much like the butterfly child I've always said I was, it was a new era, and with it comes a new blog.
So, welcome to my little journal, and feel free to stay and subscribe and comment and ask questions and wonder aloud and argue and muse. I'll be here.
Sincerely,
Mara Tenille
The Butterfly Child
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