I just recently blogged about how I took an unexpected, last minute two week adventure up north. A lot of things come with taking an unexpected drop off from the grid of everyday life. Sure, there's lot of new experiences and those few hours of joy you feel when you realize that this experience you're having is a solitary one. It's quite satisfactory to know that if you choose to keep something from social media, opt not to broadcast it, that you get to keep these special experience to yourself like a secret. It's nice to get away and not share all the little details. However, that's a topic for another time.

Today, I'm here to talk about coming back to reality. In my absence the world did not quit spinning and people's lives did not stop bustling by them. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything kept going and while I was also going, going, going it was as if it was happening on two separate planes. I came back and my old life and old worries had not diminished either. Unpacked suitcases and totes from college still sat in my room and in the garage, feeling just as overwhelming and crowded as when I had left. My phone still needed to be updated, a process I loathe because of its time consuming nature. A new cafe had opened in town without me knowing and my sorority bill still along with my car, whose oil who desperately needed to be changed, glared back at me. My everyday life reality was full and piling up and so was my online reality. 

I came back and had to confront the mess of emails and texts I had pushed to the side while away. I sat down at my computer. I hadn't blogged for nearly a month. I felt guilty, too ashamed to look at my diminished stats. In addition, my Bloglovin' account had 743 unread blog posts from the past 2-3 weeks I had been gone. Yeah, you read that right...nearly 1000 posts I had pushed to the wayside. How would I ever catch up and get everything under control? In typical Ashlee fashion, avoided everything for a few more days as I reacquainted myself Netflix and the second season of Orange is the New Black before sitting down and attempting to tackle the damage.

As overwhelming as this task of clearing out my Bloglovin' seemed, this experience of letting posts pile up has actually been a good one; maybe even a necessary one. It's been two days and I've managed to get my count down to 188 unread posts (small success!) and I'm here to tell you what coming home to 743 unread blog posts will teach you. It will teach you:

• What blogs you actually, really enjoy reading: it became apparent to me as I attempted to go through the unread posts, what blogs I had missed reading. I saw what blogs I gravitated towards and what blogs I genuinely wanted to catch up on the majority of what I had missed while away. This is great for being able to sort your follow list and create priority among your reading in an everyday setting.
• What blogs post the most often in your follow list: when posts pile up, it's easy to see which blogs have been posting the most and therefore dominating your feed. There were many blogs that I found posted way too often for the amount of time I was actually taking to read that blog. This also showed me what a healthy, consistent amount of posting looked like in a numerical way which is a great thing.
• Which blogs don't post often, but have quality content: some blogs in my follow list had only posted a handful of times in the two weeks I had been away (2-5x), but I couldn't bring myself to mark them as read because I genuinely was interested in reading their posts. On the otherhand I had blogs who had posted two to three times as much and I had no problem marking the entire set as read. It really helped me distinguish between blogs with quality I liked versus the ones with quantity. 
• To never let yourself get queued up like that ever again: as much as this helped me sort through things and really narrow my blog reading lists a bit, it's been such a pain to prune down the unread posts. Let's never neglect our Bloglovin' again. Deal? Deal.