Just Write the Damn Post

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// 2025-06-24

The title of this blog post is a message to me, not necessarily you. It's not intended as an aggressive growl of frustration, but instead, it's the crux of a lesson I've learnt from a blog post I read by Mike Grindle, whose blog I discovered this evening to my delight.

It's been nearly half a year since my last update on this blog, and the timing of the hiatus was almost comical. If you remember, I'd just started a challenge called #100DaysToOffload. I think that while that challenge might be a good idea for some people, for me, it was a foolish endeavour. That's not because of any shortcoming on my part, nor is it because the challenge is flawed. It's because I don't work in that way.

Turning blogging from what was purely a means of expressing myself online into a challenge changed the way I looked at it. It looked like an insurmountable task for a newbie to blogging like me. Rather than talking when I had something to say, I felt I had an obligation to say something if I didn't want to ‘fail’ the challenge.

And I get the principle behind it. I really do. There's a solid argument to be made that having to blog that much will encourage you to be okay with short, low-effort blog posts—not necessarily bad ones (there aren't any ‘bad’ ones, because how does a blog post fail at being a blog post?), but certainly ones that take mere minutes to write, like a microblog of sorts.

But here's the thing: it's taken me under 10 minutes to write this much of the post. I think part of the reason I felt daunted by the idea of getting back into blogging was because the last blog post I made was so big it had to be broken into two parts. On top of that, it required actual thinking (ugh, gross!). I couldn't just hop into my editor like I'm doing here and hammer away at my keyboard until I ended up with a perfectly serviceable blog post. I had to do some real soul-searching and look inwards to answer the question: what was I grateful for?

Because it's not that I don't have anything to say—far from it! My journal document on my computer has about 30,000 words, and I haven't even written in it for three years or thereabouts. But it is the case that I have always found it very easy to fall into the trap of overthinking. And when that happens, I find it immensely difficult to get out. The only solution I've found is to force myself not to think; to just sit down and hammer the words out as quickly as humanly possible.

Perhaps it's not even that I'm a perfectionist; perhaps it is literally just that blog posts that require a lot of prep really aren't my jam. Whatever it is, ~~it's a lesson learned~~ it's a lesson I'm still in the process of learning. And that's okay. Every website is a work in progress, as I read somewhere once, because one of the formal conventions of a website is editability.

Anway, it's getting late in the evening now and I'm too tired to think about this—as I say, in fact, I'm actively trying not to, and if I continue much longer, I'll fall into that morass once again. So I'll sign off here, while I've still got more to say on the subject (even if I haven't verbalised it in my head yet). Thanks for reading, and good luck to those of you who are in the same boat as me!