On words and writing blogs
Words are my tool of choice. From a young age, words have been what I used to make sense of the world around me. I've filled many notebooks with thoughts, observations and cryptic scribbles. I used to write to express myself and understand myself better. But for some time now, words have been failing me. Or perhaps itās more accurate to say, I have been failing my words. It feels like I've put a muzzle on them, and I struggle to remove it.
Whenever I think of expressing myself through words now, I trip over myself. I wonder if I should even be writing about something, if what Iām saying is just stating the obvious, or if there isn't someone more qualified that has already said it better.
But that's silly! Writing creates a space to articulate one's own thoughts and give them shape. Worrying so much about the impact of my words and the fear of being judged robbed me of the chance to write openly, and in that process come to learn, articulate, transform and grow. I don't want my words to be a final representation of who I am, but a testament to the process of who I am becoming. An exercise. An experiment. A practice.
I stumbled upon bearblog at just the right time. I had been yearning to share my work, but couldnāt find an outlet that made sense for me. toskaās post really resonated with me and convinced me it was time to give this a go. Social media felt too public, and building a site in WordPress, or opening a Substack felt too official, especially for someone without an audience. Bearblog felt a lot more personal. It felt like it didnāt have to be a polished and optimized place, but somewhere where I could experiment, dump my thoughts and figure things out as I go. I tend to fixate over āwhat goes whereā and that usually prevents me from writing or sharing until I have the āideal information architectureā. But here I want to allow myself to not think about any of that. I want to be able to reflect on life, talk about media, journal my day, or anything else without worrying about if it āfitsā.
I had already been pulling away from social media and learning more about the IndieWeb, wanting spaces that donāt push themselves on to you to extract profit from your attention. This is not out of an interest to preserve a sense of pristine independent agency, but out of concern for the way the spaces we dwell in shape who we become. Bearblogās ethos felt very comfortable, and walking the streets of this neighborhood has felt very cozy already. Iām happy to have found a place to move in to.