Finding time to write for myself is a perennial struggle. Does it mean that I'm not thinking enough?
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” - Joan Didion in Why I Write
I really thought I would keep going with blogging regularly, maybe once a month or at least once a year. It didn’t seem like much to ask of myself; after all, I write way more than that for work all the time. But maybe that’s exactly why—that the font of creativity or energy for the written word gets used up during the day. Perhaps photos would be easier? But I realized that I hadn’t posted to the “grid” on Instagram since January. The last post wasn't even a recap of this year's Taiwan trip, but just a random day that I went to the top of a tall building.
What about low-stakes writing, little quips or observations on social media? Things are a little better there, but not that much. I often think about how there’s something I'd like to post about. But then I forget to do it, or I feel too lazy to actually type it all out on my phone and procrastinate about doing it later on my computer, which then turns into never.
I think about whether this is really a problem. Lots of people are getting off of social media, deleting their Facebook, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, or whatever other accounts, and definitely not moving to Mastodon or Bluesky — or trying to migrate but losing the spark. Heck, most don’t even have blogs, or if they do, they’re gathering even more dust than this one.
There is something special about self-publishing and sharing more with the world out there. That’s a bit of the magic that has made the web exciting and interesting, creating the potential for connections between people who didn’t necessarily already know each other but share passions, ideas, or interests.
But even more at the heart of why I’m frustrated with myself for not writing as much as I previously resolved is that writing in many ways is thinking. It’s a quiet series of moments in a frenetic world, to spend time with myself and engage in a creative process (of creating, not so much in the other sense, of artistic newness). It’s a process that is the converse (or reversal) of all the reading, monitoring, input, and listening I do in this Information Age. In some ways, it contributes to the noise, but in another way, it’s taking it all in, and crystallizing and refracting all of that through the lens of my own experience, perspective, and feelings.
After all, what is the point of keeping up with all of that news, all those opinions? Sure, it informs and creates better context for decisions we make day in and day out. There is a bit of me that has just enough ego to consider, maybe I have something particular to add to it. Probably not unique, probably nothing that hasn’t been said before by someone else, but at least novel for the people who might read my words.
I still would like to write more, by which I mean I'd like to spend more time thinking – deliberatively, quietly, and to understand better how I'm relating to what I see in the world and what it means.