Every so often, it happens again. The urge to start blogging.
There was a time, decades ago now, when I was blogging consistently. Before then I was just making web pages for fun, because I could, and that could be a continuation of some humorous and nonsensical writing that I’d done. The first time I abandoned blogging? It’d become a struggle to keep up with the projects I’d mentioned there that I had embarked on. (I have a lot of abandoned projects.) It felt too embarrassing to write. Later on, I made several more and less serious attempts to try again. Each time it’s been getting harder to start, harder to continue.
So, I spent some time trying to think through the reasons it became aversive over time.
I mentioned one: Abandoned projects. If I talk about something I’ve started on, I can be very effusive and excited. People around me can get excited to see it. Almost always my efforts fall short of finishing. It’s just something I’ve struggled with. I have a deeper understanding of the mechanics behind that cycle, now. I don’t know that that gives me all the tools I need to finish something, but at least I have some means to feel less embarrassed when it happens. Historically, though, every year it’s felt riskier to talk about something I’ve become excited about doing — some idea I’ve had — even riskier to just start and make that initial headway. The thought, “Why bother? You’re just going to disappoint yourself and others, again…” comes up. Which, honestly, that’s no way to talk to myself about something I’ve become excited about.
A few years ago, I ran into a meme intended for those of us who have a “book buying problem” and guilt about the increasing stacks of books we own that we haven’t read. It compared owning a library to owning a wine cellar, with books just waiting for the right time to open them. It only recently dawned on me that I could apply the same idea in parallel to all my many creative ideas. I have a surplus of them, more than I can finish in my lifetime. They’re just waiting there for me to pick them up again, even as I come up with more. It’s nice to have options.
Another thing I realized was that I’d become afraid to be anything other than “the official version of me” on my own blog. There was a time I had reasons, many of them pretty legitimate, to be careful about what version of myself I presented online and when. I’d also developed a healthy fear of going viral, having paid attention to what can happen when people start going through your old posts and material. I don’t, though, tend to post anything that’s easy to look at as “compromising information”. I’m opinionated, sure. There are reasons to be cautious about letting loose with some of those opinions online in the current political meltdown of the U.S., but at the same time maybe it’s time I made sure I speak up, regardless. From another angle, though, I realized I increasingly feared mixing the frivolous and silly sides of myself — or even the sides of myself that others might regard as such — with posts I’d make that I really wanted others to take seriously and think about. And… Well, in some sense, I just don’t care any longer about that particular filter. I don’t think it’s actually useful. People who are going to point to less serious or casual posts and say they can’t take my serious posts seriously because of that are more than likely actually telling me they won’t take me seriously, regardless, and are just looking for some referent that’s got nothing to do with the serious post to invalidate what I’m arguing because they’ve got nothing rhetorically or argumentatively better than to try to take parts of me I enjoy and turn them into some kind of ad hominem rebuttal.
So, look, I like discussing concerns I have about the world in detail, but my cats are important to me, I play a lot of video games as a way to cope and because I just enjoy them, and I’ve really enjoyed writing Dadaist prose as humor and would love to see if I can’t do that again. The “official version of me” needs to incorporate all of me. Or else (for me) the act of keeping up a blog becomes more of a chore than a way to communicate.
The biggest point of friction for me, though, has been the social networks I’ve been on. Facebook in particular. Whenever I’ve been writing to both my blog and to the social networks, I’d usually receive anywhere from 500% to infinitely more response from people on the social networks than on my blog. Meaning that I might get one, maybe two, responses to the blog post but probably zero. And I’d get at least a very small number of people to interact with me on a social network. It’s not that blogging was harder, just that it was harder relative to a social network, and keeping up with pushing writing out to two different places can be tedious. When there’s literally no response to the blog but lots to your social network account, reinforcement learning kicks in. Hard. (Don’t suggest automating publishing blog posts to a social account. The automation is trivial but it always abridges it to something like the weirdest, least possibly representative teaser it can come up with by lopping off the second half of the third sentence. It can take a lot more time to condense something to a thoughtful TL;DR version than it might’ve taken to write it in the first place.)
Worse? The little bit of interaction I’d get on my blog eventually became 100% spam, even when I was trying to write there. Usually Russian-language spam, but occasionally English. It’s really disheartening to read a comment from a contact form wherein there genuinely seems to be someone interested and appreciative of what you’ve written, only to have it end with something that betrays the comment as nothing but a sales pitch for a completely unrelated website and whatever the heck it is that they’re vending over there. (And it’s why I’m electing to leave all comments off, even the contact form. There will be other means to get my attention.)
But now the advantage has tipped back in favor of blogging, despite all that training, despite all the aversion. First, I’ve discovered that I need to schedule the jump-scares that the news of what’s going on around me are bringing to me. I need to be aware of it, yes, but having it interrupt time I need to be able to get my work done or work on my health is, well… Let’s just call it “unproductive” for now. (I’ll probably elaborate on that another time.) Second, pretty much all of the places in which I’d built a presence have changed how they present content. Facebook, for instance, includes about 9X as many ads and nearly random “popular posts” as material that people it supposedly still connects me to. I already can’t stand listening to or watching most any advertising. Replacing any doom-scrolling with ad-scrolling is not an improvement. Third… I can’t stand the taste in my mouth, participating in many of these places, after many of their principle owners decided to donate to the election of what is now the current regime in the U.S. It’s a visceral revulsion. And the first two reasons actually just heighten my awareness, any time I’ve even flicked an app open briefly, that my interactions are lining their pockets and indirectly feeding this meltdown.
The last reason, though, is something that — for me — used to be a reason not to. Namely, blogging is public. I don’t get to curate who sees it. Not that I have any illusions that everyone is reading it. (This post is long enough that pretty much everyone but my most dedicated friends will have given up by now, at least as of the date I’m writing it.) I don’t care that it won’t have a dedicated theme, like “this is the art that I make” or “these are my reflections on current events” or “this blog is an ode to my cats”. Though it may include all of those things. It’s just journaling out in the open for others to read if they care to.
So, blogging it’ll be. Not rejoining the social networks just yet, possibly not ever. I’ll try to make it possible to contact me if you know me.
By why start now, though? I’ve gone over all the roadblocks I’ve had over the years and how I’m trying to mentally remove them, or why the tables have turned to make it more attractive again.
Just to communicate. Just to try to communicate, again.
It feels urgent, right now, that I start communicating again…
On a lighter note, I had the help of an orange tabby as I wrote this, who enthusiastically insisted we exchange affection while I was trying to type. (He purred loudly and marked me repeatedly with his scent while I petted and scratched and belly-rubbed generously.) Which resulted in a lot of typos that I had to edit out. Hopefully I caught them all. Just know that I got a lot of emotional support while actually writing out all these thoughts that’d been whirling around the insides of my head. He’s a sweetie…