Jessica Beroldi

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A Clean Slate

Sometimes when things get really bad, I dream of starting over. Hitting the reset button. Rewinding and recording over.

I do that a lot with writing. When I don't like what I've penned, I can easily hit Control+A, Backspace or Delete (depending on how actually violent toward said project I'm feeling) and have another fresh, clean document in front of me. It's simultaneously refreshing and terrifying at the same time.

It's how I end up changing writing platforms a lot of the time, actually. My very VERY first blog which started (approximately) back in 2009 was hosted on Blogspot (where I believe you can still find it under a playful URL based on a common misspelling of my last name).

When I tired of that (Blogspot lost its appeal very quickly) in early 2010, I moved to Tumblr, where I still maintain a presence, albeit less active than at its peak.

Prior to getting this position, I moved most of my writing over to my current Wordpress blog, where much of my writing still lives, under a wordplay URL of Painted Turtle Shells. (Are they turtle shells that were painted or are they shells that belong to painted turtles? The world may never know.) I then created a Tinyletter which still lives on. That provides a more personal, unabridged version of myself and my writings--basically what my childhood journals used to be, full of angst and existential longing, musing about what life could or perhaps even should be.

Now, during a time where I feel it's time for a lot of (yet-to-be-named) things to change, I think it's time for another new, clean slate.

Things have changed and what I once loved about my Wordpress space, I don't quite love anymore. I've gotten the need to start again, fresh, with a clean slate. A marketable, cleaner, version. A more professional version (whatever that actually means). A clean, white space and while convention tells me that I should fill it with plenty of images, I am one of the few that prefers to let the words speak for themselves. I don't believe "a picture says a thousand words" so much as I believe "a picture makes you ask a thousand questions." Words alone are, for me, a little more straight forward.

And here we are. Fresh, clean, anew. Perhaps even, maybe, a bit rejuvenated. Nothing reignites my love for writing like a new space.