Hello, introspection, my old friend…

Over the extremely few years I’ve been active on the internet, I’ve tried to start about a dozen different blogs. There’s something about blogging that really appeals to me. Well, there’s something about writing that appeals to me, anyway. But blogging seems to fit into this weird non-category. It’s half private personal journal, half public opinion article. And I always felt that my personal interests were too varied to fit into a cohesive narrative, or fill a need, or do whatever it is you do with a niche. In a niche? To a niche. Er. Whatever.

The point is, I struggled, because I thought focus would give me purpose. “I’m running a film blog, so I have to write about film. Even if I have something else I want to talk about, I have to talk about film.” Well, that ended up being kind of stifling. Even my more general personal blogs in my early teens were supposed to be about something, even if it was just dumping out every single one of the day’s thoughts. Even this blog had artificially imposed rules – imposed by none other than myself, but nonetheless binding. You have to write no fewer than x words and post no more often than y days a week but no fewer than z posts per month, and you can’t write about the same topic more than q times in a row, and if you’re writing a series of posts it has to be at least p posts in length but not to exceed w posts in sequence, and…

Whew! It was really hard on me. I was really hard on myself.

I’ll save the story of how I got Here for another day, but Here I am: who says my blog has to be about anything other than me? My personal interests already fit into the cohesive narrative of my life, and darn it, isn’t that good enough? I’m here today to give an emphatic Yes! (I couldn’t always answer yes to those questions, you know.)

Will I rebrand someday? Possibly. Will I refocus someday? Maybe. Is this new non-focus going to be sustainable? Who knows. But by the same token, who cares? I want to try something new. I want to give myself permission to play with my writing. Let’s find out together where it takes me.