I’m not going to complain about how fast last year went and how I can’t believe it’s over…but seriously, how did it go so fast?
As the new year begins, I love to look back over the goals and dreams I had last January and where they ended up. I don’t pay much attention to blog stats when I’m publishing things, but I do like taking a peek at the numbers at the end of the year to see what resonated with people. It’s a nice walk down memory lane, and it helps me plan content for 2019.
Here are the ten most-read posts of the year.*
10. Numbers
Sometimes words work and, other times, it’s numbers. This post was a long time in the making.
9. Bless our ignorant little hearts
Woah. I remember what prompted me to write this one, and it still fires me up. Put prayer back in schools? Loudly telling others how to live? No, you’re doing it wrong. And your ignorant heart is showing too.
8. Meet the Grahams: Chris the Nine
In 2017 I started studying the Enneagram, and it changed so much. As we began to work on our marriage with Chris sober, learning our numbers and how we relater/don’t relate to each other was a powerful tool in healing. This is the post where I explain my husband the Nine. People really like hearing about Chris; he’s a pretty interesting guy.
7. How to recover from betrayal
I hate that I had to write this one, and I hate that it’s so popular. But it’s good, too. I will go to my grave proclaiming this message as loud as I can–this one gets shared a lot and it makes me hopeful for real healing and change.
6. Damn you & thank you
I learned a lot of lessons when Chris and I separated and one of them was how to recognize pit-people. I got new, better eyes in that broken season, and it made me see people better too.
5. A million little things at just the right time
When I announced I was taking the closing of my school as a chance to write and create full time, it was scariest and best post to write. I still feel like this even six months later.
4. This is about saving myself
Telling people, as your marriage collapses, that you’re just working on saving yourself sounds counter intuitive, but it was the best, healthiest advice I had, and it was more than enough.
3. A life to bear witness
This is the post that began sharing Chris’ struggles with alcohol and alcoholism. I didn’t write this in 2018, but it’s the starting point of a ten-part series where I share how low things had gotten and where they ended up when we separated. I still get a lot of people reaching out to me via email and social media and I always point them here.
2. Meet the Grahams: The Enneagram in our marriage
Okay, so you guys like the Enneagram. I’m not surprised by this because I bullied everyone into reading The Road Back to You and forced everyone to learn their numbers. I should write about it more…like next week. I’m going to write about it very, very soon.
1. You are going to be okay
We all fall apart at one time or another, and I think that’s why this was the most read piece in 2018. We all need the reminder that we’ll survive, that we will laugh again, that we will be okay. This one gets shared a lot and knowing people are reading it and finding encouragement humbles me.
As you can tell, many of the most-read posts in 2018 were about addiction or marriage struggles. Those are popular themes because they’re really, really common. Recently, I added a new category to my blog: addiction. You can use the drop-down menu on the right to read all the addiction-related posts. Also, I created a landing page for sharing when you feel like my story might help someone. I got a lot of requests for a spot to begin and so I created this page. (You can easily access it or share it by remembering it’s trustychucks.com/addiction. That place gets a lot of traffic, unfortunately.)
*Two posts that never die and always rank at the top of my stats each year are My husband is not my soul mate and Rewarding health milestones with things other than food. Neither one of these posts are well-written, and I cringe when I read them. This summer I had to turn the comments off the healthy milestones post because, like is always the case on the internet, the encouraging comments had morphed into nasty ones, and I was done reading them. Would I write that same post again? Nope. I would definitely change some things, but it’s still helpful to people because they keep pinning and sharing it so I’ll leave it even though I’ve learned and grown from it.
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