The value of what I have to say

posted by Jeff | Thursday, December 3, 2015, 8:22 PM | comments: 1

Last month was a historically low blogging month for me. As in, I haven't written so little in more than a decade. As I'm always somewhat conscious of my identity, of who I am and want to be, I'm some combination of concerned, sad, surprised and maybe a little freed.

I love to write. For me, it's therapeutic. Getting things out of my brain cause wonderful things to manifest, whether it's saying them out loud or committing them to digital paper. This even works professionally. I can often solve a more difficult problem in minutes, provided I start talking about it with someone.

My immediate question is, why? Why am I writing so much less than I used to?

Above all, my personality has changed (hopefully for the better). I'm a lot less anxious than I was, say, five years ago. I used to write about a lot of things that made me anxious. I used to think that everything was important, especially important to me. In short, I concern myself with less, which leads me to the next point.

I have limited mental bandwidth. Not only do I reject more things from consuming CPU cycles, but life is more full than it ever has been. I have a child, and he deserves my attention. I'm married, and while I hate the cliche about how marriage is a lot of work (because I think that you're doing it wrong, or with the wrong person if that's true), marriage still means giving your partner attention. Work is challenging and I spend a ton of time thinking about stuff, maybe too late into the day. My head is pretty full, most of the time.

I'm not entirely certain what I have to say contributes anything. This might be my evolving personality, but much of my writing over the years has been somewhat masturbatory in nature. I've often written because I felt like it was good for me, and even if it was honest, reflective, and sometimes self-deprecating, I did it because it felt good for me.

Related, what am I really going to add to the conversation? I'm another guy with opinions and an asshole. Some people even make a career of having an opinion. I don't know that anything I have to say constructively adds to the noise.

I'm extraordinarily conscious of being negative. This is partly the parenting thing, but also because I fully realize how negativity can affect me overall. At some point, I started pushing away people that were negative, because having them in my life in a non-trivial way only brought me down. The world at large is extraordinarily negative (look at politics, for example). Much of what I want to spew about is in response to that negativity. I don't want to be drawn in.

The truth is, there's actually a ton of stuff I'd like to write about, but when I sit down at night, after Simon is in bed, I don't feel like I've got the energy to write. To be honest, I don't like that about myself, but there are probably a dozen things I would like to be doing that fall into this "I'm spent" category. Prioritization is hard these days. Mostly I've written about the neatness of electric cars, sometimes stuff about autism and parenting, and quite a bit of travel logging. There's more... but I need another hour in the day.


Comments

Lenny Putz

December 4, 2015, 12:49 AM #

Keep on writing ... if only for the therapeutic value. The positive take on what others see as negative is a good thing and something cyber space could use more of. But, most important, if your musings have a positive effect on just one individual it was worth writing and that calls to find the energy.


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