Reboot

I feel like every few months (or years), I try to start blogging here again. I try to "reboot" and get back into writing and "find my voice" and other stuff like that. I've never felt like I was able to find my voice here the way I did on my old personal blog, and what I wrote and the way I wrote it never really satisfied me. It just didn't feel meaningful and sometimes didn't feel like me. I think that's why I've taken so many breaks.

This morning, I was reading Timehop and looking at my check-ins from three years ago in Geneva, Switzerland, which reminded me that I wanted to blog about the sights and other memories of our trip. I vaguely remembered writing something about it, but couldn't remember if that was something I wanted to do and had started, or something I actually had followed through on. I came here to read, and then just kept reading.

I always said I never found my voice here, but I think part of that was because it wasn't the same voice as my old blog. But I started that one nearly ten years ago. I wrote about anything and everything. I wrote about random things I would see on QVC when studying. I kept track of my bar studying progress. I ranted about customer service and other vexing issues. There was no Twitter ten years ago. Everything went on the blog.

What I found when I came here this morning was a lot of stories. The voice wasn't exactly the same as before. It was more of a reflective, storytelling voice, than a spur-of-the-moment, stream of consciousness voice.

But, just because something is different, does that make it wrong or inauthentic? Couldn't it be that my voice just evolved into this? Could that have happened without me noticing since most of my mini-rants and raves just ended up on Twitter in the intervening years? Who's to say that this wouldn't be the voice that my old blog would have evolved into since a lot of the other content would have naturally filtered itself out to Twitter?

In fact, in the year after I joined Twitter, I barely even touched my old blog. When I went back to it, it felt unfamiliar to write passages that were longer than 140 characters and I felt a little bit lost. The blog had my history to inform the current passages, but how do I know that this wouldn't be the way I would write there now?

I read my old blog and I feel like I'm reading the thoughts of a different person. But I am. The person I was five years ago isn't the same person I am now. Why should my writing be exactly the same? That blog felt a little more "personal" for lack of a better word, but isn't that in part because I wrote more? Because I shared more of my life? Because I built that history?

I haven't been back here in over a year and part of it is because I don't know what to do with this anymore. I should just write about anything and everything, but I haven't and I kind of regret that because I have all these gaps. What should I even write about? I feel a bit lost as far as how to just start sharing out of the blue. But then again, who cares if I'm telling old stories about travels or reliving old memories or ranting about annoying people or saying goodbye to TV shows? That's all part of my life, isn't it?

The only way I'm going to find my "voice" here, even if it's this new storytelling voice, is to keep writing. So this is perhaps less of a "reboot" and more of an acknowledgment of an evolution. Time to move on. Just keep going. One step in front of the other. One post at a time.