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like any good aspiring-indieweb girlie, my life leaves a trail of abandoned writing projects behind me in its wake. i'm trying very hard to not make this the latest entry in this carnage just yet, so recently i've been trying to think about why.
the most successful i've ever been with this kind of blog has to have been my chost (rest in peace). there were a few things that made that site different (post engagement, my beloved / beloathed), but i think that the most impactful on me was just the kind of posts i used the site for. perhaps because of my (somewhat real, mostly imagined) audience, i was able to just talk so much easier - some of my favourite things i wrote on that site were just me trying to tell stories about random things that happened during my day. nothing i talked about needed a moral, conclusion, narrative arc, or anything else. it felt freeing in a way i've never experienced in any of my other attempts.
blogging, on the other hand, sometimes feels like a cage. a Webbed Site needs a Purpose to be real. you, the imagined reader, are coming to my site, so i need to make damn sure i give you your money's worth by writing only Good Posts.
i think a lot about one of my dear friends. she has a blog she has managed to post to more than any of mine, but still less than some other people i've seen, and an absolutely beautiful way of twisting metaphor, taking an ordinary story or mundane observation and wrapping it around into a sweet and pithy point about life or the universe or anything else. it is wonderful and beautiful and i dearly wish i could write like that and i can't.
it's so easy and so tempting for me to think of this as a kind of failure on my part - to write the thing that i'm "able" is to give up on what i actually aspire to - but fuck, the literal last entry i published here was about how i need to let myself practice things more. damn. fuck. ow.
there's a very obvious and very easy to write conclusion to all this, but in the spirit of the post, maybe i shouldn't write it.