I used to LOVE blogging. I blogged regularly from 2000 to 2010 across a few different sites - for awhile about internet and pop culture, then about design and tech called and eventually moved over to Medium (those posts have been imported here)

I never did it to build a giant audience or to make any money. It was just super fun to write about random stuff with my friends and share it with what was likely an audience of each other, maybe our moms and a few other bloggers. It didn't matter. I loved all of it - wrangling Moveable Type, designing (and redesigning) my templates, linking to other bloggers I loved, RSS feeds, etc.

In October 2006 I joined Twitter. It was a blast and pretty quickly became my favorite product + social network and remained that for over 15 years. As an introvert, I always found something about the Twitter experience that felt really good. I was able to meet and get to know so many interesting people that I'm certain I may have struggled to get to know IRL.

It also made it really easy to share your half-baked thoughts. You got most of the thrills of "publishing" with so much less work. Then came the likes, and the followers, and the big news moments and somewhere along the way it completely re-wired the way I consumed content (maybe someone posted a new tweet in the 2 seconds since I last pulled to refresh. I think I should pull again!) and well as how I approach creating content.

As I recently severed my relationship with Twitter and set out to start doing some personal writing again in a place of my own, I've found I have forgotten how to just. start. writing. Everything in my head wants to be a tweet and anything longer feels like it doesn't deserve to be more than a tweet. It's a really unsettling feeling, especially considering I have no problem writing constantly at work. It makes me grateful that I'm even able to remember how my brain used to work so at least I have something to aspire to get back to. When I think of the generations of people who will only know bite-sized critical thinking and expression, I get worried but that's something that many people smarter than me have written extensively about.

So after 6 weeks going by with nothing to show for it, I told myself that I would just publish something today to get started and this is it. Going forward I expect to write about a broad swath of things and I expect most of it will be better than this first post but you gotta start somewhere and now I've started.