Two Years of Blogging
Several months ago, writing basically fell to the ground and broke into a thousand pieces.
Shatter.
Oops.
Did I break it?
I think I did.
The shards of my writing block filled me with self-doubts and caused a customary identity crisis:
I have a blog, don't I?
But what is my blog about, again?
I broke writing.
It took me a while to realise that I was stuck inside a comfort zone, a cosy place both in my mind and on my sofa, where I wouldn't have to face the real world. I wouldn't have to face the 9-5 lifestyle, this "artificial intelligence" everyone is going on about, the cold of European winter, the absurdity of war and the lies of right-wing politicians. Fuck off. I just want my freedom back! Get out into the world again. Live from day to day. Travel.
Weeks of a blinking cursor in an empty editor window went by.
Nothing happened.
Sometimes strangers found out about my blog and asked me:
Oh, you have a blog?
What do you write about?
What do I write about?
It's simple, really simple. I write about travelling, at least if you believe my past year. Arriving in new places seems to be a theme. And lots of travel blogging, because some people actually believe it's a good idea to start a travel blog and half a year after their travels ended realise that it will take them another year to finish it.
Then, I write about retro emojis. Yes, emojis that are very retro and remind me of simpler times. There's a CD emoji, a telly emoji a phone emoji, even a fax emoji. What even is fax? And there's definitely more retro emojis to reflect upon.
For anyone who hasn't noticed: all of my blog posts seem to have an association to emojis. Half the fun of writing a blog post is picking emojis that summarize a topic in emoji-form. And yes, there's a slight chance that I think too much about emojis.
In this past year of blogging, I've also discovered that blog post can have and often should have sequels, just because certain topics reappear in your life and as you get wiser, your relationship to these topics evolve and deserve recontemplation. If you connect individual posts together you end up with blog post series, which is not only beautiful but also very soothing to my brain.
Equally soothing is digital cleanliness. I decluttered my taskbar and did the same to my contact book and afterwards felt like a new person.
And then again, there were more posts about travelling. I thought about the people who acted as travel jokers and wondered why so many Uber Eats drivers picked awful profile pictures (and in the process realised that I picked equally awful pictures for my about page).
Eight months of travelling made me miss video games. The Andes made me write about designing visited links, a better web and how I ended up writing a blog in Spanish. Also, when Peruvian food delivery services let me down, I had to write about web forms again, and I might have blown off some steam there.
Last summer's obsession with British television made me switch from American to British English (about bloody time!) and when I was suddenly back in Europe, my insomnia returned. Sleepless night in Austria reminded me of sleepless nights in the Philippines and with the return to everyday life, the aforementioned writing block was just around the corner. Shatter.
Comeback to blogging
Oh hello, internet! How have you been?
Hello also to you strangers, who seem to be curious about my hobbies and want to get to know me a bit better. I'm back and if you really want to know, I write about my travel nostalgia, my comeback to blogging and my experiences as a software user. But that's not set in stone. I write about whatever I feel like writing about. It could be retro emojis, it could be about being a user and doing what users do. But most important isn't what I write about. Most important is that I write.
Two years of blogging and blogging still is the best thing I ever did on the internet. Happy birthday, niqwithq.com. 🎈
This post is part of the series Years of Blogging