a return to space

In our current era of ever-present personal branding, where feeds and timelines and profiles seem to need to be immaculately curated to express a specific and cohesive personality, I’ve been experiencing some paralysis over my own internet presence lately, and especially with this blog.

I’m semi-regularly asked by friends and even distant acquaintances about the next update to my rather ambitious series I began in 2021—and the truth is, I’d gotten so anxious about holding each post to a higher standard of craft and precision that I’ve been a little frozen with paralysis over “getting it right” in the final two posts I plan to write. As a result, any personal writing I might have written to be posted here was overshadowed by a general sense of doom and obligation to “finish what I started” before moving on to anything else, as well as worrying that any other content wouldn’t “match” the feel of whatever I was trying to curate.

But what was I trying to curate?

Nothing! My blog has never been about any specific topic—it’s not a food blog, or a travel blog, or even a portfolio of writing samples—and somewhere along the way, I got lost worrying that anything I wrote did have to fall into some specific feel or brand. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to curate this space on the internet to be an apologetics space, or a Catholic space, or a life-update space, and so it just ended up being a blank space, where I was too afraid of it becoming a hodge-podge to let it become anything at all.

I want to finish my initial series very badly, especially now with over 4 years of hindsight and clearer perspective—but I’d also like to get back to writing more generally, and I’ve allowed my anxiety about getting those last couple of posts “right” to stretch into a long, long hiatus that’s left me out of practice with writing generally. And the more out of practice I feel, well—the harder it feels to get things “right”!

So with that being said: I plan to post on this blog again, and I hope to do it more frequently. (The bar is very low, I fear—more than a single post a year is all it would take to make that statement a reality.)

I don’t have any grand plans for new topics, beyond a forthcoming post that inspired me to write up this little “why I’ve been away for a while” drabble, but I think that’s probably for the best. I don’t want to bog myself down in more promises I may not keep—and I’m also curious whether a natural set of themes might emerge if I allow myself to simply explore what I enjoy writing about these days. Maybe a cohesive personal brand exists under all my long-windedness after all.

I can’t guarantee everything will be very eloquently-put, or that I won’t ramble, or use far too many parentheticals, or abuse the em-dash. But I would like to let my writing take up space again—no matter what shapes that space may take.