Blogging with 2020 Hindsight

It’s 2020! A new year, a new decade, and a new blog 🥳🎉🎈

The changeover of a year isn’t a significant event, but it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the year past (or in a milestone year, years past) and try to make new changes.

I’ve spent most of my adult life intentionally or unintentionally focusing on my professional work; defining my identity and worth by that work. To say that has been harmful… would be a gross understatement.

I’ve come to appreciate the importance and necessity of living in a more authentic, integrated way. Even as a small example, moving emphasis from work that I do at company X to just work that I do. If I put in 100 hours on a podcast series, is that any less important to me just because it is something I do in my free time? (No)

At the beginning of this new decade, I’m hoping to make a change that I started in the last one, and that is to live more authentically. I’m hoping that blogging is one way that I can do that: sharing openly about my experiences and feelings. 🥰

A tl;dr of my history with blogging

My past experiences with blogging have been… inconsistent. A brief timeline looks something like this:

• Livejournal / Deadjournal (Hosted) — ~2001-2005
• Wordpress (Hosted) — ???
• Octopress (Self-hosted, Ruby) — 2012-2013
• Pelican (Self-hosted, Python) — 2013-2014
• Hexo (Self-hosted, Node.js) — 2014-2017

Over this timeline, my blog served different purposes: A day-to-day record of my life (LJ/DJ era), an exploration of new jobs (Octopress era), learning new technologies (Pelican era), and even a brief exploration of grief after an important loss (Hexo era).

Despite this multitude of uses, the timeline itself can be misleading: while I was using LJ/DJ, I was blogging almost daily, but over the last four platforms I wrote just over forty posts, combined! I didn’t use some of these platforms enough to write much more than a single blog post! 😰 ¹

And as best I recall, all of these attempts turned out the same way: a big push at the outset, configuration, development, possibly even a period of regular updates, then … nothing. No updates, no changes. Nothing. ²

In a word, inconsistent.

Why?

Given that, one might ask, “Why bother?” And the answer to this is I want to grow 🌻

Since my first, or even the latest attempt at blogging, I’m not the person I was then. I’ve made choices about how I want to live my life, the people I want in my life, the priorities and balance I want in my life.

I know things now that I didn’t know then.

• I know that it’s not reasonable to expect to post once a week (especially if I don’t plan for it), and setting unreasonable expectations does a lot more harm than setting no expectations.

• I know that getting something done at all is better than doing it perfectly, because then something actually gets done.

• I know that doing 1% of something, even if that feels like it is not enough, is 100% better than doing 0% because over time that 1% grows, and 0% does not.

• I know more about myself. That I tend to close myself off, which leads to feeling isolated and alone. That as an introvert I do a lot of thinking in my head and not by speaking. I know the combination of these two things… is not good for me! 😬

… And I know that I’ve grown and want to continue to grow. There are no guarantees that this time will work out any differently, and that’s ok! My goal is to write once a month, and right now that sounds eminently reasonable.

It’s ok for me to give up on blogging for now, or forever. That’s fine.

Because it’s 2020, and that’s what I can see in hindsight 😊

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