I haven't blogged in any significant way since 2009, unless you count Twitter, which you shouldn't, so I won't. I tried to do some regularly-scheduled music criticism stuff on my website and was moderately successful (at least from a creative and scheduling perspective, hardly anybody read much of that stuff), but that doesn't fall within my personal definition of 'blogging', which I guess would be more accurately termed 'journaling.' I also started a podcast, which in terms of both creative legitimacy and total audience is about equal to my old blog. But I haven't sat down to write (directly) about my personal life in a (tehnically) public forum in well over a decade.

Until now, I guess.

Not that you asked, but I have a pretty simple answer as to why I've stepped away from something that more or less defined my teenage life, which is that I'm now in therapy. Anyone who read my old blog (in which case: sorry!) could tell you that my usual mode of posting was very different from the confessional style that dominates most personal blogs. I didn't really want to share my feelings, I wanted to hint at my feelings in an obtuse way that would, hopefully, inspire curiosity and, I guess, lead people to reach out and establish the intimate personal relationships I so desperately craved.

And it didn't work! Like, at all! This secret fantasy (so secret even I didn't know I had it) that my friends would be able to recognize my pain by decoding a series of unrelated song lyrics and movie quotes never really came to pass.  The most I ever accomplished through my blog was to make people mad, either at me or each other, and I barely even did that. It turns out, if you feel anxious and sad all the time and you feel like something in your brain isn't working right, the best way to deal with that is to find someone qualified and tell them about it directly.

Hence: therapy!

If the term had been more widely known in the mid-2000's, and if I had slightly more self-awareness, I might have recongized my blogging style as a form of branding, only instead of trying to sell shoes or present myself as a person of exceptional worth, it was all one long, inscrutable cry for help. This was, obviously, not very useful to me as a tool for personal healing, but it was also a failure to understand the ultimate goal of writing, which is to reach outside of yourself in an act of empathy and connect with other people in the world, entertaining and enlightening them, sharing of yourself not with the goal of inviting futher interest, but in the hope that someone will recognize something of themselves in you and that they will find that useful, I guess, I guess, I guess.

When I wasn't writing deeply coded explorations of my own pysche, the only other thing I ever devoted much attention to in my blog was the act of blogging itself. I'm doing this now, I realize, but only because it's what I want to talk about, not because I'm doing some sort of cutesey meta bullshit. I can't say for sure what I will use this space for in the future, but I can promise you right now that it will not be solipsistic essays about "what it really means to blog", because I have finally caught up with the rest of the world and realized that a blog is just a place where you share your thoughts and experiences with a grou of people who exist at various points on a spectrum that runs from 'friend' to 'stranger.'

It's simple! And it was always simple. I just made it complicated, for reasons that made sense at the time but now look like barely-disguised coping mechanisms. But I'm trying not to do that anymore. So here we are.