Hello Again, World!

The post in which a writer with the best intentions resets to match reality

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

My friends, I love you.

This is how I have started many of my longform posts on Facebook, the ones people loved to read, the ones that led to a friend encouraging me to shift that writing here. I came over, ready to write and continue writing. Then I read some of what was out here, and decided I needed to change what I was doing.

I decided I needed to ramp up the professionalism. I needed a schedule. I needed to keep to that schedule, and write about Important Topics.

Instead I stopped writing. I’ve been navel gazing about it for a few weeks, and this post has bubbled up. Here’s what I see has happened.

I was losing my sense of wonder at the natural world in the desire to Teach Something Important, and then questioning whether the latest thing I’d learned was something others would want to know, or already knew. I was enjoying the journey into technical writing with our fictional dispatcher and the runaway felines, but I was questioning if, with the rise of AI, my words were Important Enough to put out there. If my old-school technical writing skills were still useful to anyone. Then there was the fact that I was essentially writing a manual on writing a manual but in a conversational manner that broke the rules I was describing, and there were manuals that had been Done Before and Better and therefore what I was writing wasn’t worthwhile.

I lost what I loved. I lost what I loved about writing, about dashing off something in the moment full of energy and emotion and proper grammar (or not, as the moment dictated). I lost the feeling that I was putting something out there in the wide world that, even if most of the wide world did not pay attention, was still out there for the one person who needed it.

I took myself out of my posts.

I hid behind the professionalism. I hid behind the schedule. Most telling for me, I’d stopped using my opening phrase. All that changes now. (To be honest, I’m kind of terrified by it.)

Actors talk about leaving everything on the stage. All the emotion required to create a character comes from their own emotions and their passion for what they do. Here’s mine, my passion, my emotions, my love for all of you. Because it’s true. I try to leave everything on the page.

So here’s the reset. No more schedule. We will revisit our dispatcher, when I feel like it and there’s bandwidth. Nature will come when it comes, not just on Fridays but when something cool pops up on my radar. And I will write of other things, like that love I mentioned, and what I mean. The small pop up yarn shop business I own will feature once in a while. I’ll return to the person I have always been, just Lori.

I hope you’ll come along with me on this adventure.