Why Write

When I restarted my blog (again) this year, I, like all the times I did before, had a resolution to start writing regularly -- probably not every single day, but maybe every other day, or at least once a week. And, also like all the previous attempts, my frequency of writing peaked around the moment when I first restarted the blog(s). Just look at the post frequency on this blog: I created this "shorts" blog around April 24, 2022, specifically so that I can "dump" some of my random ideas without worrying about structuring a full blog post. In the first 3 days after creation, I posted 3 times, while the next entire month, May, saw 5 posts in total. In June, I made only 3 posts, and this month, July, there was only one post at all before this one.

It is ironic that every time I stop writing for an extended period of time, it always seems like I have way more ideas for writing than what I could ever write. Every idea I ponder, every question I ask, or even every situation I get myself into, starts to look like missed writing opportunities. This is the reason I am so prone to fall into the cycle of starting a blog, abandoning the blog, and then restarting it again some time later. In the past, I thought that the reason of abandoning my blogs is a mental standard of writing that is set way too high, such that it imposes too much pressure on me when trying to write, so as to discouraging myself from writing anything whatsoever. But as the situation of this blog has clearly shown, it is not the case, or at least not the sole reason why I fall in such a cycle.

Yet another case of over-confidence before learning how hard something really is. We as humans just tend to forget the real difficulty of doing something, even if it has been done before by ourselves. My "abundance" of writing ideas is definitely one example -- it is true that I tend to have a lot of random thoughts, but how many of them are actually worth, or even suitable for writing? Without trying to come up with an article for it, even just a "short" one like I have here on this secondary blog, it is simply not possible to tell. Thoughts that pop out in my mind are just that -- thoughts. There is no reasoning behind them, and there is no guarantee that they even make any sense at all. Other times, they do turn out to be reasonable ideas, but the reasoning stretches too far into my very personal background, which I may not be comfortable revealing. But without attempting to write them down, they always seem to be the best idea ever.

Maybe, after all, that is where the benefit of writing, or rather, the process of organizing thoughts into a feasible product as a post, ultimately lies. Through the process of writing, I gain insight into my very own mind, insight into which thoughts are purely impulse-driven "anger thoughts", which of them are distinctively "me", inseparable from who I am, and which of them are both well-supported and suitable for publishing. Of course, given these facts, not all of what I write will end up being published, but all that I did not publish do not just go to waste. Without the process of attempting to write them down, I would have never known how bad some of my takes were, or how naïve I could be as a person. That, and not just the product, should be the reason to keep me writing.

I am, of course, losing motivation on blogging after so many failed attempts of posting articles from my random thoughts, just like the many times I did before. But at least this time, I have something different. I have this secondary blog, where I can dump my less-completed posts and even just ideas. For all the drafts that never made into either of my blogs, I now have a diary sub-folder in my Standard Notes workspace to archive them all. They serve as reminders of pitfalls I tend to slip into when my mind is wandering around, snapshots of who I am at the moment I created them, and, more importantly, reasons for carrying on with writing, even if no visible "products" are produced.