I used to blog pretty much every day. Sometimes, more than one entry a day. For ten or fifteen years, I wrote diary entries, then things I was thinking about or that were going on, reactions to things in the news or popular culture.
Some of those entries were developed into other works. Some of them got to sort of later become parts of my first book. Some of them got me noticed by different people who later gave me opportunities. Some of them were just satisfying little art experiments.
Blogging was a way to process stuff in my brain, and get to share my writing with other people; I got to be creative. I kept doing it as my journalism career grew and evolved, but as I moved into jobs that were more and more about writing, I think I had less energy and word space left in my brain at the end of the day (or on my lunch break; don’t tell my old bosses) for stuff that wasn’t work. Maybe I also got tired of having to have opinions and thoughts on things all the time. It felt like you had to be current, and early, and also preferrably have strong opinions. Or be super brilliant. It wasn’t about being noticed or getting super famous and successful, but having only a handful of people read something kind of felt pointless.
Slowly, blogs became less and less of a thing in general. People read, but stopped commenting. Then stopped reading. You get out of the habit, you either feel like you’re forcing it or you stop.
My last blog post here was from XOXO 2018. I have a half-formed post about XOXO 2019 in my head but it feels almost silly to have once-yearly solo posts.
But does it matter? I don’t know.
At least now, if and when I get around to my XOXO post, there’ll be something else in between.