Sometimes I struggle with the goal of this blog. It has been many things over the course of its existence. It was originally established as a dump of video game writing after I gravitated away from LiveJournal in 2011. Even then, that platform was pretty much dead. That little experiment only lasted for about two entries before falling through. I resurrected the blog the following year to document my ranked games in League of Legends, which is an interesting artifact of the past because it reinforces just how much a part of my life that game was at the time. It's not a game I think about often these days and haven't played it at all for a few years, but back then--man, I was invested. It's interesting how things change. I don't even like the idea of investing that much time in a game that I can't definitively finish.
Now that I'm writing about this, I'm looking back over old entries on this blog and of course it's sending me on a huge nostalgia trip. I begin to cringe a little over some of my old writing and particularly of those League of Legends entries because they're written by such a categorically different person than who I am now. It's very jarring. There are some old entries penned by a very depressed, hopeless version of myself. I see recurring themes of my personality that have persisted to this day. It makes me a little sad. Things have improved but they also haven't.
After I stopped cataloging the League of Legends stuff, I started a new experiment. I was going to update the blog every single day with absolutely anything I could think of. I actually really like that I did that because I kept it up for a very long time. I'm skimming through them now and finding some actually pretty cool insights about myself. One passage in particular from Day 4 really sticks out to me. I was talking about the crappy, dead-end job I had at the time and I realized that even though I was in a rough spot at the time, there was a sense of optimism in my writing that feels refreshing to me now. What I said was "I miss being a source of knowledge to people. I like to be able to answer questions and resolve situations." As it turns out, that's exactly what I do at my current job! And it's still true. I derive a lot of satisfaction from being able to help people in that way.
A common theme that I discussed then that remains true to this day is that I have this desire to create, to write. But I also want to share what I create with others. I want to promote discussions. I've never been able to do that in a meaningful or satisfying way, which also makes me sad. I'm not sure what the solution is, because if the answer is "just keep writing," then well, I've definitely done a lot of that. It's clear I need to be more proactive, to take more steps in making this happen. And maybe it won't, but I'd feel a lot better if I had more agency in that process.
This blog has, since its inception, been a repository for writing, about video games, about my life, and even for a time, for fiction. When I was blogging daily, I started to run out of things from my life to talk about, so the next logical step was to start making things up. I did a lot of that and amassed something like 50,000 words of the primary story I was working on, but there were a couple of other minor stories that sprang up alongside it. That was a really fun thing to do, even if the entire document ended up being a really disjointed mess, since I really was just making it up as I went.
Can it be more? Does it need to be more? Does it serve as a portfolio of writing or simply a massive catalog of how I've wasted innumerable hours? Is it even worth examining at this point? These are questions for which I have no answer, which is frustrating.
I think the only real conclusion I can draw is that no matter what happens, I should keep writing. I can't help the fact that it bothers me that I don't have the ability to reach an audience, though, because it's a reflection of my life. I feel I have interesting things to say, but one-sided conversations are rarely fulfilling. Maybe I wouldn't feel so drawn to the type of writing I do if there were more people in my life with which I could discuss these things in the first place. I write to get those thoughts out, but when there's no feedback or really any indication that I'm being heard, it feels... discouraging. Part of the goal in writing is to improve my craft, which is definitely a valuable pursuit, but the other goal is to reach someone, to promote a discussion. And that just doesn't happen. I've been doing this long enough and consistently enough to know that the path I'm on now won't cause it to happen. So I'm going to need to make some changes.
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