There’s some point in the decline of a blog’s activity at which you just can’t apologize with a straight face for not posting any more. Only ironically.
I brainstormed reasons why I’m not blogging. It took a while for me to find a reason that felt right, but I think it’s mostly the concern that I don’t have anything important to say, and I’m just spamming people’s inboxes or Facebook feeds. I make fun of my perfectonist tendencies, but they haven’t gone away and have been exacerbated by how public this blog feels now. There’s also a general feeling permeating life that I should be trying to present myself professionally to people, because like a diamond, the Internet is forever.
I don’t know why I tried to publicize this blog, with all its years of hyperbolic angsty ramblings and emotional baggage from a different era, by linking it so tightly to my online identity and other blogs and by tagging posts so that they’d appear on some WordPress search thing. I went through the motions of getting people to read my blog because that was what bloggers were supposed to want. But it may have been counterproductive for what I actually wanted my blog to provide. Instead of feeling inspired or motivated that my writing will reach lots of people or whatever, I’m just a lot more skeptical of my writing and constantly scrutinizing it to see whether it’s complete, accurate, evenhanded, noncontentious, and just a modicum relevant to anybody other than me at all.
Linking it to Facebook was a particularly bizarre choice. I think when most people add others as Facebook friends, the implicit social contract is that this means “I’ve met you or know who you are” and mutually granting the ability to send messages, look up more information about the other person, and maybe occasionally getting updates. “Occasionally” being the operative word — certainly not “weekly 2,000-word screeds whenever you feel angsty and start binge-posting”. Probably a third of my Facebook friends won’t ever read this just because of the language it’s written in.
In hindsight, I think most of the people I want to read these posts know how to sign up for a post by email, or subscribe with an RSS reader, or just check a blog randomly when they’re bored.
This blog will stay here and I will probably keep using it for “public” public statements or actually polished writing, but I don’t think I want to update it substantially more often than the pace of the last couple of months.
I made a new blog a few weeks ago and tried just not caring and writing like I was in fourth grade again. It felt right. That blog isn’t going to be private because I don’t like making echo chambers, but I’m not going to share it here; ask me if you want to read it. Or find it by being really good at either Googling or perfectly replicating my thought process for picking a new blog subdomain. That is all.