It’s Been a While, Working Girls

A long long while.

This post has been sitting in the back of my head for months and months. There were a few attempts to type it out and few moments that I thought were right to share it. But they never were. Now, is the right moment for me. I am no longer working at the company I blogged about on an almost daily basis (no, I am not sharing that story), so I feel like it’s time to share why I stopped blogging almost a year ago.

Let me begin with why WG2 and I started Working Girl. In college, we had a dream to start our own magazine. We had a name, a concept and even a sales pitch. Well, at least we thought it was a sales pitch at the time. Having worked in sales and marketing, I now know it was not. It was more like two giddy girls blabbing about their dream to anyone who would listen. Once we graduated and started working, WG2 and I were completely lost. We didn’t know how to find an apartment, how to handle co-workers and bosses, we didn’t know much about the working world.

So, Working Girl was born. Our intention with Working Girl were to take our experiences and create informative posts that would be helpful to other Working Girls out there. We always knew we’d take an anecdotal approach because it’s fun to read and easy to relate to. But at some point, most of our posts became the story of our day-to-day lives at work. This was all fine and good, when NO ONE read our blog.

Then we became a Blogger Blog of Note and things got crazy, people all over were reading Working Girl but still its was only about 2,000 hits a day. There is no way someone would read a post and know it was one of us, we thought.

Well, we thought WRONG!

We never posted the names of the companies for which we worked or the names of our coworkers. But we always truthfully shared our point of view of our lives. Which got this Working Girl in trouble. One day, this girl wrote about how someone left the company and then she was promoted.

I’m not sure exactly how it happened I believe it went something like this: someone read the posts and thought something like “that sounds like my friend who left that company,” told that friend. That friend read the blog put a lot of pieces together and discovered that she knew Working Girl One. She told someone in the office who told someone else in the office and before I knew it, my entire department knew about Working Girl and that I was Working Girl One. Yeah, everyone.

For days and weeks, I thought I was going to be confronted about it. But I never was. I tried to keep blogging, without all my anecdotes, but it never felt right. I always felt like I was being watched or judged by what I wrote and while I wasn’t ashamed (ok fine, I did delete a few posts that I regretted posting on the information super highway), it didn’t feel right.

Finally, I just gave up. I stopped blogging, I stopped tweeting. And it broke my heart. In the short time we had been blogging, it became a HUGE part of who we were. It was something we discussed everyday, thought about everyday and did everyday. When I stopped blogging, I felt a little lost.

In the last year, there have been so many things I’ve wanted to share. Everything from reviews of The Rachel Zoe Project and The City to things I’ve learned and experiences I’ve gone through. And I think I’m ready to start sharing again, but perhaps with a little more caution this time. :-)

I don’t know that I’m back for good, but I’m back for a little while and I feel like I’ve gotten a little piece of myself back.