Why is it So Hard to Come Back Here?

With apologies to Madonna, though I really do love that song. But I asked myself this between coming back from the treadmill and starting the shower. Why do I feel like it’s so hard to sit down and write a blog entry? I used to write these all the time, sometimes multiple times daily. What changed?

Obvious answer is social media, but is it the only answer? Even before Twitter, when we were using LiveJournal, we wrote all the time, at high frequency, and we’d get responses and replies from people just as often. While LJ could get siloed into communities and cliques, I think about those days in comparison to the sites that came after.

Tumblr probably feels closest to LiveJournal in that it was someone posting their whatever and people replying and reposting it, sometimes creating massive threads. Some of which are still shared around to this day because they’re just fucking brilliant. Myspace started to take it in more of a Facebook direction. “This is my wall, and what I like and think,” with edgy background music and cursor trails.

It was still somewhat of a conversation, but didn’t always feel that way. Facebook weirdly was blend of all of it. Post a thought, picture, video, get some comments, and possibly have an entire dissertation in the back and forth. And then came Twitter which initially condensed it all into text. Literally, we were texting to 40404 to post tweets. But with Twitter and Facebook starting a few years apart from each other, they really moved it forward to a place that feels like we did less “posting just to post” and more “posting because I want people to see it”.

And that latter? That was the reason for my blog. I’m Gen X, seeing Doogie Howser, M.D. type in his journal every week really pushed the idea of “What if I had a journal (not diary), and it was online?” into my mind. I often look back at my old entries and I’m usually mortified that I would post that online. Occasionally I’ll go back and scrub details, or anonymize people, but none of those personal stories of thoughts make me feel particularly ashamed, and they can’t really be datamined, so I leave them up.

One thing that did keep me writing in those transitional days from platform to platform is that I knew people actually read this blog. I would get comments from friends and strangers. I’d see people linking to posts on their own blogs. It felt different from getting a like, retweet or reply on Twitter. If felt like intent instead of reflex. I guess it was that feedback that kept me writing.

…in part, anyway. The other part was that it was so much simpler before search engines got attitudes, algorithms, and SEO. I’d come up with a meaningless title, ramble 50 to 300 words, hit submit and that was that. If I remembered to categorize it beyond “blog” and add tags, it was no big deal.

Asking Me to be in a TTRPG

But I admit that got sucked into the whole SEO trap. I even have a WordPress plugin to check that my headline is engaging, and make sure that I remember to add a cover image, so it looks nice when people share it on Twitter (as if people ever do), and tags in case someone’s trying to search my blog (again, as if), and a little paragraph in case someone’s searching for my blog on another site (see previous parentheticals), and something called a “focus keyphrase” which I don’t fully understand the need for, but I get reminded if I don’t use it often enough.

With TikTok potentially going away, maybe it’s time I get over trying to do things for the aesthetic. (I’ll be real, I loved her rage bait videos because they were satire. But I hated them because they weren’t clearly satire.)

All of it sort of gets in the way of just writing. And not only that, but it also makes me second guess whether my silly stray thoughts are even worth writing down and posting. (I’m just a blog writer, I can’t imagine what that feeling is like for real authors.) Over time I’ve thought of getting a plugin that auto-creates posts or digest posts of my tweets, but that feels like too much noise, and it wouldn’t make this site distinctive from the other ones.

But like I wrote yesterday, it’s a habit and I have to get back into it. And see if it survives my actual week of day job, multiple streams, freelance content creation, etc. Maybe that’s what I’m really nostalgic for, back when this blog was my creative outlet instead of now having to exist as a robust profile on so many platforms while also doing so in a way that feels authentic. It’s exhausting.

But apparently writing 800 or so words on a thought I had a few hours ago… isn’t. So that’s nice. 💖