three minutes read

To blog again

So it turns out I can blink and see one year and a half go by, who knew. To say that things have been less than ideal and that plans made were plans ditched is sort of an understatement - I mean, end of January I was quietly celebrating having finally beaten a 4 month long, recurring infection with weird exams and my first ever surgery and now we’re in the middle of a once in a century GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

“It hasn’t been ideal!” — said David

Anyway, for the longest time I’ve been feeling disconnected with the world, trapped in my own head. I never had many friends and I made mild attempts at getting physically closer to the ones I have but between my illness and now a national lockdown, it hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. I still talk to them via the customary Chat application du jour and it’s great, I mean, it’s really great and they’re great people, but the more I disconnect the harder it is to deal with people in general. And it gets slightly worse if you take a group of individually brilliant people, together they form a mass of overachieveness that you simply can’t compete with , at any level.

“Finally, my powers of introversion prove useful” — said No One Ever Esquire

The other link I have to humanity is Twitter and that’s been a different kind of beast. It’s a literal amalgamation of people and machines, of the meek and the powerful and it’s society in compact form. It takes a lot of work to curate who to follow and what to be drawn into and not, who to pay particular attention to for the good reasons and also for all the bad ones. It’s also a space where you can say what you want and be surprised at who’s listening and who talks back, but it’s also unpredictable and work intensive, connections are flimsy, context is slim and shortness is king.

“in a room with 1 billion voices, nobody can hear you scream so your best bet it so scream along with them”

In all this I’ve been closing myself in, I go quiet and most of the talking goes in my head, which works great but more and more I feel I need to let some of it come out, not for the sake of other people but for my sake. It’s Rubber Duck Debugging but applied to real life, it’s a mental health tool, one of many, one I want to explore a bit more.

Which lead me here, to my blog, where words come to die, or to be cast in stone, whichever metaphor suits me at the time. I’ve decided to reinvest in it and now especially I decided that I need to simplify my own access to it, so I’ve been quietly reworking some of the infrastructure and tools to remove any difficulty and adjacent excuses, this post is a trial run of that work.

It’s also a test to myself, to be able to say and publish whatever goes in my mind, not worrying about how that looks and what people might think, which is a particular issue I have. I don’t mind ridicule and in practice I’ve handled embarrassing situations very well all my life, but while it’s easy for me to handle things when they happen, I COMPLETELY DREAD THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOMETHING I’M DOING MIGHT CAUSE SUCH A THING TO HAPPEN.

People are just weird, sadly I too am People

So we’ll see, I want to get into some sort of rhythm, the more you do, the easier it is, the more you do - I’ll practice that for a bit and see how it feels. This one’s for me, just for me.

Stay safe, stay well, much love David