I came across this text from Christopher Butler today, where he mentions some notes about the act of blogging that he took back in 2010. Parts of his text ringed with me, specially because he mentions the act of writing in a blog as “this experience of being able to express ourselves without any restriction” and the accompanying “awe and excitement of publishing on the web“.

It took me a long time to get back to blogging. In spite of having started to blog somewhere in 2007 or 2008 — that is, fifteen-ish years ago — I later completely walked out on it for many years, first trying to convince myself that it was because of lack of time, but then acknowledging it was because I had lost interest in it for many reasons, depression and anxiety included in the package. I had maintained a website with a blog and some other random stuff and cancelled my hosting plan (although I never cancelled the domain name, and that was good).

Sometime last year it occurred to me that something was missing in my life.

I’ve always liked to write and it’s been sometime now that I’ve been feeling better with myself. This something missing was it, it was to write. Maybe in a blog, maybe not. The thing is, during this same period I came to know about note taking and figured out that was something I’ve always done, just without knowing it had a name. So I came across very fine apps like Obsidian, Logseq and Tangent Notes, all of which I still use on a daily basis to register my thinking. As I wrote my notes locally, I started to consider the idea of writing in a digital garden, publishing some thoughts, but unorderly. I liked this idea. Then came omg.lol, a wonderful service that, among many features, offers image hosting and weblogs: that was enough to awake that feeling of wanting to blog again, so I created a blog there and it was just a matter of time until this blog here was reactivated.

Christopher Butler’s text reminded me of the therapeutic effects that a blog can bring. As he says, with a blog “I can share the part of me that is afraid of dying, the part of me that is ashamed by my own thoughts, jealous of someone else’s success, that loathes myself, that is afraid of being misunderstood; all of the fears and anxieties and little things that twist around in your gut; that if you’re sensitive and smart and insightful enough, you’re managing to deal with; you can exercise these in a different way“. That is, I can share mostly anything, and I guess the secret to keep such blogging therapy a success is to write, first and foremost, to myself, for the fun of it, for the joy of it.

Sitting and writing what’s on my mind, figuring out what thoughts I want to express and shaping such thoughts in a way that makes them readable and understandable to someone else in a blog post format is very nice. And if and when I feel there might be anything else, not suitable in a blog, there’s always the possibility of falling back on streams of thought, private journals and digital gardens. Anything counts, because all of these things, as blogging, are therapeutic as well.