For a blog (or let’s just call it a website at this point, since “blog” kind of implies new posts are added more frequently than like once a year) that I’ve spent untold hours designing, building, breaking, re-designing and so on, one might wonder “why not just delete the whole thing.” I wonder it myself, frequently, since the longer it sits here, dormant, the more it stresses me out. God knows my life is essentially a never-ending parade of should self-shame; a blog that zero people give a shit about or even know exist, you’d think just deleting it would be easy-hanging fruit in terms of relieving myself of at least one “should.”
But for whatever reason, I can’t. In spite of the fact that nobody reads even established blogs in 2024; in spite of the fact that I’m not exactly lifestyle blog goals; in spite of…basically all the things, for whatever reason, I still think of Chic n’ Geek as–cringy or not–my “personal brand” and I can’t imagine just disappearing it without ever having given it a real chance. Chance at what I’m not quite sure; I suppose chance at being the next chapter of my story after I spent 14 years writing Mizz Information.
Even if Chic n’ Geek looks like a half-assed, abandoned attempt at starting a blog, it’s actually weirdly so much more to me. While I’ve pretty squarely failed with regard to creating content here, Chic n’ Geek has actually proven to be kind of shockingly productive/successful at least to me personally. While it hasn’t yielded writing (at least published posts–I’ve actually written plenty of posts, only to have them still sitting–probably permanently in drafts), it’s spawned entirely new skills and passions–design and web development–that honestly never occurred to me when I set out on that little “refresh” too many years ago to even remember now.
Granted, in the world of blogging and “content creation” in general, absolutely zero people other than me give a shit about my newfound abilities, and/or whether I’ve written 100 posts or the basically zero I’ve written. So…I’ve failed, what? Readers? Not a thing when you have none, so–bonus! Myself? I mean, kind of, because the reason I blog…or used to blog…is because I love writing and blogging afforded me the chance to write stuff other than journal scribbles and helped connect me to the world in ways I’d never imagined when I started doing it–yikes–like 20 years ago. I miss writing, and I miss feeling like a part of me is out in the world…but at the same time, the fact that not writing led me to accidentally begin expressing my creativity through art and design when words just felt too…fraught…kind of makes up for it.
At the same time, the more distant I feel like I become from the me who just wrote because it was what I did, what I loved, the more acutely I feel the loss of a bigger part of myself than I would have thought. Through writing, I became braver, bolder, less self-conscious; in many ways I feel like I inadvertently wrote myself into a career and life that brought me a ton of pride and satisfaction. And then, just like that, through not writing because I felt lost and at a loss to even articulate…much of anything, written or spoken…it was like my life just kind of came to a standstill. Which is where, in pretty much all respects, it remains.
So I figure if just starting; just writing was how I started in the past, then why not just try it again and see what happens? Worst case–nothing, which is what’s already happened and where I seem to be stuck, so no risk there. So–yolo–I figure if I’m going to keep stressing about not showing up here then I may as well at least show up, which might at least ease one “should.” So who knows–maybe another year will go by and this sole post will have turned out to be a non-starter. Or maybe I’ll finally feel inspired to actually start what I originally embarked on the infamous “quick refresh”? I guess we’ll see. Or, I should say, I’ll see : )
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