I created my first web page in 1994, four years after Tim Berners-Lee kicked the whole thing off. I started my first weblog in 1995, almost three years before the word was coined. Before that I was active on BBSes, so I've had somewhere to ruminate semi-publicly for quite some time.
Yet for the last few years, I've shut down existing outlets and mostly shared my thoughts with a very limited list of friends and family in iMessage or Signal. Maybe a bit of Slack and Discord. I've watched people come up and hit the big time, and other people bigger than I ever was walk away much like I did.
At some point blogging stopped being something fun to do, and started being a chore. Instead of posting my thoughts and finding clarity, I'd see thread after thread of comments on site after site devolve into the most graceless possible interpretations of whatever was written, and it became tiresome. Tiresome to write, knowing people would see whatever they wanted to see rather than what I was saying. Tiresome to read, as the same thing happened to others. Even being an active observer was exhausting, as the culture of the entire internet seemed to focus on a never-ending cycle of outrage.
It doesn't help that during the same period of time, I became more aware of just how deeply the country I live in is built on the bodies of people it chewed up and spit out and continues to disrespect to this day. That shouldn't even be a political issue, in my view, but *everything* became political, and people picked teams.
I changed mine, but couldn't work up the energy to blog about it. I knew I'd face pushback. I knew I wouldn't convince anyone of anything. My close friends and family came along for the ride, or at least observed it, but nobody else needed to know anything.
And that's really the thing. I don't need the whole world to see everything I write. Obscurity can be a boon.
Technically anything I write here is just as available to the world as anything I would have written on a blog, but it *feels* different. It feels less like I should expect to be shamed or harassed here. I also have the ability to block people and servers easily, so I'm starting to relax.
It could be that I have nothing significant to say about anything after all. Several times my friends have suggested that a rant in Signal or iMessage should have been posted somewhere, and I've never been sure whether they meant "so more people can see it" or "so I don't have to read it here." Either way, it seems like they'll soon get their wish.
