Why so serious?
Sometimes I have the feeling that I take myself (and this blog) too seriously.
All of the editing and the attention to the title, to the slug, to the length, to the paragraphs, to the sections, to the headings, to the words.
(And that’s without even considering my pet peeves about how the text looks on screen, like the ones I mentioned towards the end of the article Wait but why.)
Sure, I don’t want this blog to look like a ungodly regurgitation of each and every random thought that crosses my mind. Incidentally, this is also why I have always refrained from metablogging. And I usually (mostly) avoid profanity. But also: honestly, who the fuck cares?
It’s a blog, not a book or some kind of curated work. It’s alive, and it will never be finished nor completely polished.
To some extent, this blog is meant to track my growth over time. So what if I’m thinking about what I should be doing with my personal blog?
Oftentimes I thought I should be treating blog posts more like emails and less like essays. But there’s also another thing, which is that writing to me is a way of thinking and learning. Obsessing over a topic until I make a clear idea about it. Editing is a natural part of that process, and short essays are the natural result.
(Trivia: one of the reasons why I wanted to make this blog is that I was already writing articles, except they were metaphorically dusting in my computer in the form of notes to myself instead of being publicly available as blog posts.)
Other times, though, I write because I just want to dump what’s in my head so I can stop thinking about it. And that’s ok. It doesn’t even have to go public.
But this one is, because I wanted to remind myself that publishing in my blog doesn’t have to be a painfully long and emotionally taxing process. And that if at 2 am I find myself thinking and writing, maybe that’s important, so I should not be censoring myself. And that even if I haven’t written everything I wanted to write, even if I haven’t caught each and every thought I’ve had, even though there are mistakes and typos all over… that’s ok. Why so serious? :)