A hiatus and a return

Hi Everyone,

On February 13, 2009, I signed up for a blogger account because I wanted to share my writing with others. My first readers were my friends and family. Then somewhere along the line people who I did not know started reading and sharing my work; people even started hiring me to help them with their ideas. I loved every moment of it and fell in love with the topic of entrepreneurship. I fell so much in love with entrepreneurship that I'm in a PhD program researching the topic.

For two years, I was able to maintain both a blog and being a student. The blog was thriving, business was growing, and I was doing great in school. I thought I could easily manage being a PhD student, blogger, and business owner. But over the last two years, I have not been able to maintain the blog with the level of care that I like to put into my work. Being the stubborn (determined?) person that I am, I thought that I could do it all. So I reduced the number of blog posts and clients I was taking and maintained doing my school work. It was kind of working; I was having some money come in from freelancing and I was getting good grades. But something else was happening that I didn't realize; I was exhausted and spread too thin.

This summer with the help of others, I realized that I was sleep deprived, stressed, and pushing myself way too hard. I was trying to somehow stretch 24 hours to fit all the responsibilities that I had taken on. I rarely took breaks and burnouts were so normal to me, I didn't realize it shouldn't be the norm to be down all the time. So I'm now working on reducing the number of things I am committed to and the hardest one to part ways with is this blog. But, it is the right thing to do.

I'm in the final stages of the program and if I am to achieve my goal of graduating by December 2018, I need to cut some things.

I've decided to stop blogging and taking on clients (and doing a whole bunch of other things) so I can focus on graduating. It is a temporary break, but in effort to prioritize and keep up with the demands of the program, something had to give.

I have notebooks filled with ideas and sketches, so don't worry, I am coming back. I love blogging and creating content too much to stop forever. I don't have a return date for regular blog updates, but I will keep you all posted on my progress and expected return.

Thank you for all your support over the years. And please feel free to keep in touch; shoot me an email.

***Lisa-Marie

Photo by Joel Peel on Unsplash