I remember when blogging was something people did to express themselves without worrying too much about quality. It was a daily thing, a quick thing, something informal and loose. It wasn’t a big deal to throw up a blog post. Everyone was doing it. This was before Twitter and before we had the Internet on our phones. Dare I say, before we had out attention spans blasted into smithereens.
Well, I’d like to claim some of that back. That feeling of freedom, that spoken quality of written voice. If I have to edit and rewrite and shape every blog post as if it is essay, it becomes a chore. That’s why the habit doesn’t stick. I have too much else I’d rather be doing. But I lose something in not blogging at all. There is energy in thinking something through as you type, like a first draft.
Perhaps I could go back to blog posts as first draft thoughts and creative nuggets. If it’s not fun, I won’t do it. I can edit the hell out of my stories, but I need somewhere to write freely that’s not Twitter, but is still public. The public part is important. There’s energy in public writing. At the same time, I need to let go of the critical voices in my head that hate having loose words and incomplete thoughts in the public domain.
I want to get better at accepting that I will get things wrong, that my opinions will be wrong, that I will make grammatical errors and that is okay. It’s good to be able to change my mind in public. So much of what we see and read in the news is people with fixed viewpoints not listening to each other. Fuck that. There is a better way.