A few months ago, on the 20th anniversary of the word “blog”, Marc Weidenbaum wrote a post celebrating blogs, and asked his readers to start a blog.
I used to love blogging, and maintained a few in their heyday. For about 10 years most of my content consumption happened inside a newsreader. But at some point walled gardens happened, and RSS feeds were shut down with the excuse users did not want them - nothing to do with our walled garden, honest guv. At around the same time, I had other demons to deal with, and stopped blogging. Blogs left my world, both as a reader and a writer.
Reading Marc’s post brought back all the fond memories I have from way back when - and I am very much in tune with his attitude toward content creation, but more importantly the benefits of blogging he points out completely resonate.
Demons. Writing in public is, for me, at this point in my life, absolutely terrifying: I have an insane fear of being judged and being found lacking, of not being the best - this is a tad problematic. Which is why I have decided to take it up again; if I have learned anything in the past 10 years or so, it is that if you do not play, the demons win. And I have won a couple of battles by dint of attending (yep, sometimes it is that easy).
I am not sure what I will blog about yet - the past couple of years have seen me getting back to noodling, and in a couple of months I will be playing a live gig for the first time in about 8 years, so there will be a lot of that - process, tools, snippets, I cannot tell yet. There also seems to be a steady stream of Instagram snapshots - I miss shooting to a brief, and editing a story down to the the handful of photographs which told it, but hey - another one to chalk up to the demons. Which probably means mental health will feature from time to time, if I can muster the will. I am not sure what else - I have pretty much stopped coding at home unless it is something to be used for music, and I absolutely refuse to engage in the toxicity of current politics (two of my favourite subjects, in the past), so there will not be much of that, if any. And there is of course the distinct possibility that I will drop this - it is, after all, an experiment, and it might not work for me.
In any case, my RSS reader has a wealthy dose of subscriptions (many from the wonderful community at Lines - reading through the blogging thread inspired by Marc really pushed me to do this), so it is time to relearn old habits, and maybe even regain a little bit of self-confidence.