Life has been crazy lately, and I haven’t seen my daily writing habit in months. I have a hundred blog posts written, but I forget exactly where they are, and I remember thinking none of them were amazing. So I’m in that position that I created that habit to get out of: it’s the night before a post is “due”, I’m unwilling to skip a day, and I’ve sat here for an hour writing intro sentences for a million different posts.
I wanted to write about how, when giving advice, I used to always just tell people to do exactly what I do. In time, I realized that the best way to support someone is to give the advice that will bring them closer to their goals and desires, rather than what you’d do with their resources to get to your own goal. I think I already wrote that post, though, and I’m not sure if I posted it or not. Then I realized that I spent about four hours today explaining to my friends why they should buy bitcoins and possibly buy a plane. So maybe I’m not so good at that, after all.
I scrapped that post and came back to an empty box. What am I thinking about these days, I asked myself?
Well, I have one cool project I’m doing, but it would ruin it to talk about it before it’s done, so I have to wait on that. I know exactly what the blog post is going to be, though, and I can’t wait to write it.
On Wednesday I’m flying to Boston to see my family. I go on all sorts of crazy trips all year, but my favorite ones are just hanging out in houses with my family. I just did that for Thanksgiving and I’m about to do it again. But what’s there to write about that? Family’s important? Try to have a good family if possible? My mom once made the point that my siblings will be the people I know the longest in my life, so those relationships are really important. That’s a good lesson, but I can’t stretch it out into a blog post.
Next month I’m going to Romania. That’s a random story, but I expect it will be much more interesting after it’s over, so I can’t write about that. Plus it’s one of those stories that involves other people who might not want to be written about.
The gear post is coming. I have all the gear and I just need to write it, but it’s too late to take photos and make links and all that. I’m going to try to have that one ready for Friday.
I have a few more cruise stories, like this one where a prank went horribly wrong and we really offended some people and spent a bunch of time trying to make it right, finally succeeding in the end. I’ve told that story a bunch of times in real life in the past week, though, and the moral of it is that I can be a jerk by accident sometimes. Anyway, I think I might turn my readers against me if I keep talking about cruises all the time.
It’s been almost exactly nine years since I started writing this blog, which is pretty wild to think about. I was twenty-three when I started writing, and now I’m thirty-two. It’s been a packed nine years, and I feel so fortunate to have written it all down. I scroll through the archives sometimes and I can see some of the turns my life’s taken, goals I’ve set and achieved, goals I’ve set and forgotten, and a bunch of posts I hope no one will ever read, but that I won’t delete.
I started this blog to capture a very short period of time. I was going to adjust to this crazy sleep schedule called polyphasic sleeping and I wanted to remember it after all the delirium had passed. Polyphasic sleep was a hot topic back then, so a bunch of people started reading. Some stuck around when I got off the schedule a few months later, so I kept writing and never stopped.
But I started the blog just to capture a moment of my life for myself, and that’s been a big chunk of the benefit I’ve gotten from it. A bigger one is the people I’ve met, but capturing events and emotions and interactions that would have otherwise blurred into the past has been fantastic.
Sometimes those moments crystallize into a good blog post, and I sometimes worry that I give the impression that everything I do works out perfectly and teaches a lesson and is meaningful. Of course, that’s not how anyone’s life is. Sometimes it’s one thirty in the morning, you should have written something earlier, but you got caught up talking about poker and planes and bitcoins, and you now find yourself staring at a blank page. Maybe those moments are worth capturing as well, but even if not– at least the page isn’t empty anymore.
###
Photo is from the national park on Lanzarote. Chosen to symbolize how fertile my mind is for blog post ideas at the moment.
The end of the post got me thinking– is anyone still around who started reading during the polyphasic thing? I would be really curious to find out.
By the way, if you’re a Sett blogger and have been pasting posts in, give the editor another shot. It’s come leaps and bounds in the past few months and is quite good now.
Leave a Reply