This isn’t a blog
It’s a journal.
It’s obvious now, I mean it’s taken me a while, but I guess that’s because I’ve long been blinded by my own egotistical aspirations, spending far too long hanging on to the coat tails of the original bloggers in the vain hope some of their success would trickle down to my small silly corner of the internet, all of it back in a time long forgotten…
It’s 1999, I’ve just created an account on Blogger, I’ve manually copied and pasted the posts I had originally hand coded in HTML and I’m marveling at the ability to type text into a box and for it to instantly appear on the internet for everyone to read. All nicely formatted and laid out according to the template I had chosen. It was a marvel. No blockers, no technical challenges, just text and maybe an image, posted into a form magically appearing on the internet to be consumed by (potentially) the entire connected world. It’s such an everyday experience now but back then it really was a marvel.
Not being that forward thinking, I spent the next year or two posting random nonsense, sometimes multiple times a day, whilst reading other blogs, following links, searching the Yahoo directory for undiscovered nuggets. All the while, my contemporaries were focused, crafting niche content, finding their voices, building businesses, crafting unique worlds around their words and thoughts. Some of the people I was lucky enough to meet in real life went on to publish books, TV shows were developed, and elsewhere successful organisations were built that continue and thrive today.
I’ve always been prone to introspection though and so it was inevitable, really, that this blog skews to my own internal monologues and thoughts. I’ve never been a specialist either, something that bugged me for a long time. I’m not really great at any one thing, but passably good at a few so it makes sense that this blog has never been about anything more than my ability to write my thoughts down and publish them online.
I’ve said some of this before, of course I have, there is little new in the world it seems.
Which is also something I don’t really do, I don’t create. There is nothing new here, not real reason for people to stop by and there never really has been. So to what end does my voice matter?
Well, it matters to me. And a long time ago one post mattered to one person enough for them to contact me directly about it. But beyond that it is purely a journal, edited, censored, but shared. A glimpse of a life half lived. And that’s the real reason.
I write and publish to be seen. To be appreciated. My long sought approval by my peers that still drives me to this day.
It is ego. It remains an aspiration and, as the blogging cycle comes back again, I find myself rediscovery old voices I thought lost and as they whisk by on their sleek and honed vehicles, I reach out blindly once more. Perhaps this time they will take me somewhere.
Perhaps.
