2022 - The year of the blog?

January 8, 2022

2022 the year we hope the pandemic finally comes to an end, a year of new hope, of midterm elections (what already?), a year of new jobs, new hopes, new habits, and the most important question I’m sure you all are asking is: “Is 2022 the year of the blog?”

I’ve decided that I’m going to lean hard into the blog this year. There are more hip and with it technologies that I could tout,⊕You won’t find any cryptocurrency or web3 here. but this year I’m leaning on something that’s tried and true and partying like it’s 2002. That’s right it’s time for a good old fashioned weblog.

I could have just slapped these posts up as articles on my website. After all, my website is supposed to be a Digital GardenA digital garden is a type of website meant to hold a variety of content in various states of “growth”., but while I like having articles on my website, this more informal, time-bound writing just didn’t quite fit into that category.

You see for me it always seems to come down to writing…writing and it’s purposes. In my life writing has always had at least two purposes. It has been a way to create and a way to make sense of the world around me. For most of my life, one of the ways I tried to shape and make sense of myself was placing myself somewhere on the journey to becoming a vocational, paid writer. It shaped the books I read, my major in college, how I thought about my time off, and even my daily habits. If you asked me from the age of 10-26 what I wanted to be when I grew up I’d say one or more words from this list: writer, author, journalist, poet, screenwriter, speechwriter, technical writer.

And one of the most amazing things about being human is that our self-perception actually can shape our selves and the world around us. This website exists because of my desire to write, a book of poems exists because I established habits around writing, and now over a year after I decided that it would be alright if never became a vocationally paid writer it’s the reason I still feel the urge and desire to write and continue to make sense of the world here on my small patch of internet.

So why is 2022 the year of the blog? Well I could talk to you about all the benefits of the web blog as a medium, about how it helps me lower my barrier to writing, how it will ease me back into the practice of slowing down and selecting words from my cloud of thoughts to plant. But the real answer is, because I want to see how my life will be different because I said that it is.

Other things to read

• Editing a Year
  "Good writing is editing." I know this is true. There are many thoughts that can be expressed more simply and many more that don't need to…
• On Writing Poems Daily
  My reflections on writing one poem every day for a year.
• Hypertext Writing
  Every medium has its strengths. There are considerable strengths inherent to a digital, web-based, way of thinking -- first and foremost is the sheer amount of interactivity and connections you can make.