“If I’m completely honest here, I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this” - what a brilliant start to a first blog post in a webpage I’m sure to abandon in a few months. At first, it might look like nothing, it is in fact an almost empty statement. There is one idea it does convey, however: Writing this feels weird. I’ve never been one to post too much stuff publicly on the internet and there are a few things that kind of scare me about it, so I try to give myself a way out in case someone reads it and decides it’s embarasing enough to make fun of. “Oh yeah, totally, it is kind of cringe” - I could say, and save myself some serious social axiety.
Several things go through my mind when I think of the idea of starting a blog, of posting this. First, what if nobody reads it? Or worse, what if one or two people read it, which is more likely to happen and so it becomes even more obvious how silly of an idea it is. Am I just talking to myself? Is this just a place for my thoughts to exist? If so why make it public? Why make it accessible to not just everyone that knows me but everyone that might want to hire me in the future or randomly finds this on the internet?
I have written stuff in the past: from short stories when I was very young to several unfinished diaries, each with a different format and attitude which I was sure would keep me writing for longer. I actually still keep some of them today: a story I wrote at 11 years old won a local contest and got “published” in a booklet along with the other winners, I still keep two copies and read my part every two or three years. It’s funny to me because it neatly encapsulates a small fraction of my worldview at the time, and it’s something I’ve shared with close friends sometimes. But I’d never post it on the internet. Given that it did win a small contest, it might already be on there, I’ve never thoroughly checked. Still my point stands: these writings are reflections of a person I’d love to belive I no longer am. And so they are private. Anything I write in a blog is likely to suffer the same fate, I’ll eventually grow tired or ashamed of it and pull it down, so why publish it in the the first place?
Second, I doubt I’ll be able to keep this up. If I do decide to start writing and sharing a few crazy thoughts I have from time to time, how long until I start getting tired? Until I stop writing? Everything ends, sure, that’s not what worries me here. It’s more the how and the when. If I, say, kept this up for a year or two, wrote about once a month, managed to write actually compelling stuff and after that, simply left, I wouldn’t be too mad about that. What is way more probable however is that I’ll forget about this one or two months in and with any luck I’ll maybe have written one more blog post after this. (Knowing me, I’ll probably keep paying to keep this up for about a year in the hopes that I’ll definately write more.)
However the beggining of this post isn’t sincere: I do know why I’m writing this, and why I’m likely to post it. A good friend of mine recently found this thing called the Indie Web and he started a blog (check it out at www.aferrero.boo) and I found it to be an interesting intiative, whose goals I actually stand for. I also want to see him write more stuff, and I feel like that’s much more likely if there’s someone joining him. I do actually hold some hope that eventually somebody else will read this and the rest of the stuff I will surely write, but for now, supporting stuff that I like is enough of a motive to start this.
~ B.
