Actually Finishing

I’m at a bit of a creative crossroads and it started with my Yearly Theme.

This year is my Year of Curiosity (sub-theme: Process, more on that another day, maybe). I learned the value of following my curiosity to wherever that may lead, whether that was a relatively impromptu solo trip to London to see the Tom Sachs exhibit at Thaddaeus Ropac, or trying books that I wouldn’t ordinarily read, or simply breaking with pattern and listening to different and new music.

Before, I often stamped out this feeling with the usual patter of excuses - not enough money, not enough time, what about x responsibility, it’s going to be too much. Now I’ve gotten evidence to the contrary, I wanted to see how far I can take it.

Part of that also includes allowing myself to go down new rabbit holes around my hobbies, old and new. Try to pick up drawing again, go further with my writing, maybe try copy work as a means to get me using my pens and paper more. This however presented my first and most frequently faced problem - the desire to share and the desire to hide.

Curiosity and creativity for personal reasons are fine, but often feel hollow. Art demands to be shared, after all, as does life. Not matter how hard I try, no matter my impulses to hide in my room, I still crave interaction. After all, I’m still human.

Plus, if there’s something I’ve learned from this experiment, it’s that sharing and holding myself accountable for things publicly helps spur me on. Beeminder too is a great example of a solution I would have otherwise shunned that worked way better than expected. Still, I’m hesitant to share that kind of thing here.

It’s not like I didn’t address the idea of pivoting or widening my subjects here. It was always the intention to expand if there was the interest on my end, although to be honest that was with the intention of giving myself permission to write about other topics if I was running short. But I do wonder if the constraints aren’t part of the reason why I’m still going. Yes, there’s been some one or two meta posts, but even they have been loosely related to the topic of the blog. As a neurodiverse guy, the constraints might be the killer feature.

Another option is another blog. The plan I’m on allows multiple, and I don’t necessarily need a URL. I just don’t know or think I want that here.

I like micro.blog the format. The UI is great, both for the feed and the basic blog page. Minimalism has been the main aesthetic I’ve looked for in my many blogs over the years. I’m not sure I like it as a platform for the social side of it though. Particularly with the mobile app, I find searching for posts and topics near impossible, even the blogs I do find I want to follow end up in my RSS reader anyway, with the app being used to reach out every now and then.

The lack of analytics is a surprising drawback too. Initially, I found it freeing. No numbers to watch go up or down, no incentive to write a certain way about certain things. But more and more it feels like I’m shouting into a void. Like a journal, which always feels like a hidden thing.

I fully appreciate this is a user thing and not a platform thing; I definitely don’t think anything should really change here, and I’m likely just dealing with the major difference between here and the algorithmically generated internet. If I maybe put way more time in to digging out and trying to make connections more, get over the roadblocks in my mind, it’ll click. But I just can’t help but feel that long term, this place isn’t for me, or rather I’m not for it.

So then, what’s the way forward?

Problem for another day.

For now, my wife calls. Bluey then bed.

It’s not all bad.