I feel like I've disappeared.
I haven't posted in here in forever. I haven't written in a paper journal in forever. The websites and places that I used to write for are gone -- to be honest, the internet has changed a lot since those days.
There are still blogs out there, thinkpieces all over the place -- that's not changed and likely never will. As long as airlines treat people like cattle, or marketing companies think racism can be solved with a Pepsi, or America elects an idiot to be the most powerful man in the world, there will always be overlong diatribes that you can read and react to.
But the landscape has shifted, and I didn't shift with it.
Maybe I could have started a podcast, or switched to a youtube platform, but.. I didn't.
And this was all before I had a heart attack last November.
In the space of a few years I went from blogging nearly daily during free time at a job I really loved and dating an amazing woman to getting fired, fumbling away that relationship, becoming largely disillusioned with my own writing, bouncing around a few different jobs and finding myself with dangerous amounts of self-reflective free time where I got down on myself for all of the above.
Oh sure I had time to write -- but I had no drive for it. I didn't enjoy the process anymore. I still had thoughts, but putting them to the page felt empty, somehow. I look back on it now and feel like perhaps I had hit one of those points where I'd begin to think of my writing as a means to an end. Like I was doing it to get to something -- a book deal, or a regular gig on some aggregator website or blog where people read and reacted to me more often.
But at some point I started to feel like I was just spinning my wheels. That writing semi-regularly kept the instrument sharp, but that the opportunities weren't going to just come to me, and beyond producing content -- I wasn't making any constructive effort to go find the opportunities myself.
Worse, this crisis of conscience happened around the time where my perception of the change in Internet readership was at a peak. Or to put it more clearly, at a time when I started to see people moving away from reading blogs and personal rants, I had come to feel like I really didn't love blogging and personal ranting the same way I used to.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy writing. I've always loved it. I do it for a living (albeit in a stale, corporate manner).
It was that I was taking it for granted.
I do that a lot. A lot more than I probably like to admit. It's a shitty quality for a person to possess, and a bad way to live your life.
But if nothing else, it gets results. Because when you take things for granted, you lose them.
They fire you.
They break up with you.
They become clogged, struggle to work, and seize up late one night -- leaving you on the floor with bolts of pain in your chest and arms while you struggle to breathe.
There's more to this story than I'm telling. I'm not even totally sure why I'm really telling it, or who I'm even talking to. But it feels like something worth doing this morning. That's not to say that it feels amazing, or that I'm a changed man who will write all the time and eat vegan and run on a treadmill 6 hours a day from now on.
There will be fits and starts. There will be days where even when I know I shouldn't, I'll blow it all off and get a donut. And there will just as likely be days where I do put in good time in the gym and have a salad for lunch and say no to that second cup of coffee and I will get on the scale and it still shows me up 3-4 pounds from where I was the day before.
Because it's not clean. There's no montage music.
Chances are it's going to take more than Ralph Macchio and the length of a catchy song to figure all of this this out.
I haven't posted in here in forever. I haven't written in a paper journal in forever. The websites and places that I used to write for are gone -- to be honest, the internet has changed a lot since those days.There are still blogs out there, thinkpieces all over the place -- that's not changed and likely never will. As long as airlines treat people like cattle, or marketing companies think racism can be solved with a Pepsi, or America elects an idiot to be the most powerful man in the world, there will always be overlong diatribes that you can read and react to.
But the landscape has shifted, and I didn't shift with it.
Maybe I could have started a podcast, or switched to a youtube platform, but.. I didn't.
And this was all before I had a heart attack last November.
In the space of a few years I went from blogging nearly daily during free time at a job I really loved and dating an amazing woman to getting fired, fumbling away that relationship, becoming largely disillusioned with my own writing, bouncing around a few different jobs and finding myself with dangerous amounts of self-reflective free time where I got down on myself for all of the above.
Oh sure I had time to write -- but I had no drive for it. I didn't enjoy the process anymore. I still had thoughts, but putting them to the page felt empty, somehow. I look back on it now and feel like perhaps I had hit one of those points where I'd begin to think of my writing as a means to an end. Like I was doing it to get to something -- a book deal, or a regular gig on some aggregator website or blog where people read and reacted to me more often.
But at some point I started to feel like I was just spinning my wheels. That writing semi-regularly kept the instrument sharp, but that the opportunities weren't going to just come to me, and beyond producing content -- I wasn't making any constructive effort to go find the opportunities myself.
Worse, this crisis of conscience happened around the time where my perception of the change in Internet readership was at a peak. Or to put it more clearly, at a time when I started to see people moving away from reading blogs and personal rants, I had come to feel like I really didn't love blogging and personal ranting the same way I used to.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy writing. I've always loved it. I do it for a living (albeit in a stale, corporate manner).
It was that I was taking it for granted.
But if nothing else, it gets results. Because when you take things for granted, you lose them.
They fire you.
They break up with you.
They become clogged, struggle to work, and seize up late one night -- leaving you on the floor with bolts of pain in your chest and arms while you struggle to breathe.
There's more to this story than I'm telling. I'm not even totally sure why I'm really telling it, or who I'm even talking to. But it feels like something worth doing this morning. That's not to say that it feels amazing, or that I'm a changed man who will write all the time and eat vegan and run on a treadmill 6 hours a day from now on.
There will be fits and starts. There will be days where even when I know I shouldn't, I'll blow it all off and get a donut. And there will just as likely be days where I do put in good time in the gym and have a salad for lunch and say no to that second cup of coffee and I will get on the scale and it still shows me up 3-4 pounds from where I was the day before.
Because it's not clean. There's no montage music.
Chances are it's going to take more than Ralph Macchio and the length of a catchy song to figure all of this this out.
[Now Playing: Black Crown Initiate - "Matriarch" ]
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