Back to the blog

A few months ago I wrote a tweet that was a bit tongue in cheek but also true.

Whoah, can you believe it’s been 10 years since Twitter killed my blog? #MyTwitterAnniversary pic.twitter.com/3grbcf0tVy

— Erin Brown-John (@eebeejay) April 5, 2018

I’ve always loved Twitter. I love the way that I can stalk the thoughts of interesting people that I don’t know and may never meet. I love the ease by which I can push things out. I barely have to think about it.

That’s really the problem, isn’t it? You say your little piece and then it disappears and at the end of the day you have nothing to show for it.

At some point in time blogging became too hard to do. To write something every day, to edit it, to add links, to pair it with an appropriate image, (or, in my case, a Sebald-style random or only tangentally-related, uncaptioned image). Then I’d have to to resize that image appropriately and upload it then preview and tweak until it all looked okay. At some point in time that stopped feeling fun and started feeling like a lot of work. So many steps. I got tired of it and I got busy with other things.

But there’s something about spending conscious effort and time on things. So much of the way that the world is designed actively discourages one from pausing to reflect and plan. Maybe that’s why I started my mending project and why I’ve jumped with both feet back into knitting. They’re slower activities. They give me time to think.

Earlier this year everyone said that they were going back to the blog and I got excited. I half-wrote a blog post with the best of intentions, then promptly got distracted and now here we are three or four months later. Typical.

And now I’m blogging about not blogging and returning to blogging. Also typical.

But here I am. I have shit to say, and I’m going to say it.