No one is Reading anyway - Why I've been inactive recently...

selfhelp4trolls(75)

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You may or may not have noticed that I've been less active here. There isn't one particular reason for that, it's many things.

My health is the biggest reason. It's actually getting better, it would seem, but I've been spending hours a day trying to figure out how to best manage and improve my overall health, to stabilize myself so that I can actually start to exercise without any complications.

The second reason is that Confessions of the Damaged 1.2 (a mini-novella）is almost ready for release and I've been formatting it into a PDF file and talking to the cover artist about the final details for the cover, which is now finished. It should be available by the end of the month on Amazon and all that.

The third reason is that a huge part of Hive is about reciprocal engagement and I just don't have time or energy to read blogs these days.

Lastly...I've always had a complicated relationship with this blog and this platform. I am trying to figure out how to move forward here...something I've been trying to figure out since I've started. I love it here, don't get me wrong but...

Am I writing for you or for me? If both, than when (if ever) should I stop myself? Should I worry about alienating you? Should I worry about whether or not what I share offers any value? If the things that I can offer are as powerful as I believe they are then how much should I be recklessly throwing into a blog post when most of the people who read it will only do so in the first 24 hours after I post it?

How much should I carefully sculpt a post as a way to advertise my fiction and my music? Should I even bother or should I treat this as a self indulgent place to play with my own ideas. It's easy to get caught up with what other people or doing or with what gets the most comments or rewards. Once you start getting attention, you don't want to be too self-indulgent because it will scare people away.

My favorite art is the art that is created in self indulgence. That doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy or appreciate every single act of that artist's self-indulgence. I enjoy watching my favorite artists making shit because they are already my favorite artists. I'm not sure I'd be as interested if I didn't already know that they are awesome. They usually filter their work, even if it is self-indulgent. They don't often share things without trimming them, editing them, or polishing them.

My dream though is to create work and share ideas so awesome that even if I am so self-indulgent as to ignore all the trimming, editing and polishing, it will still keep you reading or listening. How realistic is that though? How many artists or writers don't even edit and still have an audience?

With my novellas, I will always edit. I enjoy the art of polishing them. But for a blog with a 1-7 day window of relevance....

But then to share myself unfiltered...what do I bother sharing?

"Just be yourself". It's a really easy thing to preach. We are supposed to have solid, and unmoving personalities. I don't believe in those. And what happens when you are water or air? What happens when you melt and solidify many times a day? How much of myself am I supposed to show? How do I show a self that is constantly changing?

When we watch a movie, we don't see 8 hours of the character sleeping, 3 meals from start to finish and every bathroom trip. The director is selective with what they show.

Even instagram posts are extremely selective. People are careful about every little detail of what they show to the world, sometimes making huge efforts to show a self that they believe others will like, or that they themselves like, whether it's accurate or not. And almost everyone forgets those posts anyways.

"Just be yourself". Come on. I can be anything, and chances are, no one is reading and no one will remember anyway.

I only realized recently that very few people appreciated my meta-awareness of how algorithms dictated what I saw on facebook. A few more people here appreciate the meta-awareness of what motivates us to post at Hive.

In all honesty, I'm just tired of these 1 hour windows of relevancy that come with social media, be it old school facebook or blockchain based Hive. I want to finally make something that lasts. It doesn't have to last 100 or 1000 years. I don't care if I'm forgotten after I leave this world, but after 5 years of blogging here, I feel like I'm just regurgitating the same stuff over and over again here, and I've reached most of the people I am meant to reach who are currently on this platform.

It is fun to regurgitate sometimes. I have grown a lot so re-exploring the same ideas has some value, to me at the very least. But there are other things I want to put that time into these days.

I am not complaining about Hive or about Facebook. I love Hive and I would actually like facebook if it didn't have such a dirty company behind it or such annoying algorithms. All I'm saying is, I'm trying to challenge myself and to grow and I'm not sure how much creating "quality content" that will disappear from your feed in 48 hours is helping me grow. I have a shitload of quality content. And some shitty content. And it's all mixed together in an endless list of posts from 2017 until now.

That's not to say I don't have things I still want to do here. I'm not leaving, and I won't as long as the friends I've made are still here. I want to continue to get to know everyone. I want to help onboard more people into this awesome community. And I have always enjoyed Hive as a scrapbook, a place to try out ideas before I work them into other media, or to organize my thoughts.

I think I will feel much more comfortable with Hive once Leo has released project blank. It's a lot easier for me to shit little micro-blogs out into the wind to be forgotten by tomorrow than to put an hour into something that I hope inspires whoever reads it, knowing that it's unlikely anyone will likely read it after a few days.

I've been playing along all these years in order to "build my brand" and "build a following" and all that shit, but you can probably tell how much I hate thinking about all that, and I've always ended up breaking it all down and building it all up again because "my brand" (which is essentially just a name, "I+Everything", or "Self Help for Trolls") only excites me when I'm in the mood for it.

I see why people separate different aspects of their life now. I don't want to hide any one part from each other, but at the very least perhaps I'll eventually use my 3 different accounts for different purposes.

I miss posting easy posts that aren't meant to impress anyone or get anyones attention. I miss just having fun with it.

Maybe I'll get involved with @mariannewest's freewrites again. I had a whole lot of fun with those, even if none of them garnered the same payout as other stuff I've shared. I felt like those helped me grow every time. I'll do some more Cross Culture prompts when I have time. I still have a huge personal project I want to work on that will overlap with Cross Culture too, that has been waiting til I feel better physically.

Anyway, please don't take this as a negative post. I'm feeling pretty good, making a lot of progress in my life and I'm still in love with the community we've built. I'm just growing out of my old relationship with it and need to find a new way to interact with it. This has happened before, it's always a good thing.

Love you all.

🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎