Back to a Quiet Spot
For the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling to write. I even went as far as to write a blog post, publish it, and then immediately delete it. Since that evening, I’ve written three more posts, that I just cannot bring myself to hit publish on.
Why? Well, they are negative. They talk about how much I hate what blogging has become and how I don’t see a place for me in it. A few months ago, I decided to step out of the shadows of my quiet little blog, and rebrand it with my old domain name of Brandon’s Journal. I’m not sure what I expected, but I think part of me wanted to show the online bullies they didn’t get the best of me, and the other part of me wanted to rekindle the online relationships that dissolved as I took my blogging into the shadows.
I succeeded with standing up to the bullies, but my blogging just wasn’t the same. I didn’t rekindle those relationships, because many of those folks have quit blogging. Others, it’s hit and miss. I can’t deal with the negativity, protests, tech outrage, and whatnot. That is not what I like to read or be part of, and so I really thought maybe my blogging days were behind me.
I talked to my wife a few times about this, and even consulted ChatGPT. I decided I’d just wait it out and see if I still felt like blogging after a few weeks or not. Several ideas came to mind, but I wasn’t happy with where I wanted to share them. I didn’t want to use my old domain nor did I want to really share them all that public. I wanted my quiet blog, where I could just write about anything and not worry too much about platform changes, discovery feeds, etc.
A few nights ago, I realized it was time to go back to the basics. I needed to get back to what made me love blogging again last year and that was a quiet blog on WordPress, self-hosted, without any drama. And so, I began the work to restore my blog to the best of my ability and while it’s far from perfect (I got some missing images that need fixing) I feel like I made the right choice.
This blog wasn’t overly advertised, and I’m guessing a couple of people may have it still in their RSS, but otherwise I won’t be advertising or linking it. I’m just going to get back to writing for me in a less performative style.