… and we are off. The first, shiny new blog post of the year is here!
I hope you had a restful end to 2022 and are looking forward to what 2023 may bring. I am still on holiday, having taken some overdue leave and I am enjoying the extra rest. It’s giving me time to catch up with my thoughts, do some exercise and celebrate my partner’s birthday with a trip to the coast.
Back to blogging. Literally. I am kicking off my year of blogging by writing about blogging: for the first time in a few years, I have set up a new space for me to write in. A counterpart to this one, my primary domain, which offers me a private space for articulating my thoughts.
Two spaces?
It’s actually more than two spaces to write in, as I like to write a lot. I have paper based and digital journals, in which I write with blue and black ink and I like the speed of writing with a fountain pen as well as the sound it makes. A noise I had forgotten for a while.
I also have plenty of digital spaces to write in, mostly work-related, from social media, others’ platforms and this site, my own space.
It’s useful for me to have more than one space, as it helps me write about the different things I am interested in, and with different readers in mind.
Most people know me online through my day job, and they may not necessarily want to read about lots of unrelated things. I have tried in the past to bring everything I do together, but over time I have found that having separate spaces works better for me.
Why private?
This is a topic I have written about before, as I have always had different degrees of openness in my practice. It helps me to have a private space: it makes me feel safe to be completely honest, to write things down that I am still puzzling out, and to have a space to work through doubts or worries. It also gives me a space to revel in being me.
Most importantly, I find it fun to set up a new space for myself. It gives me a wonderful sense of turning over a new leaf. It’s the start of something.
I came across something I blogged about in 2018, about how completing something fun is an important part of my practice:
As often as I can, I dedicate some time to doing something fun. For example, I enjoy making a web page and publishing it. Or making an image for something. Or reading/writing something. It doesn’t really matter what it is, it’s about completing it and getting a sense of achievement from it. A quick win. A lot of what I work on is a) long term, b) invisible or c) collaborative and so in order to balance these with feeling that I have accomplished something I often do ‘something fun’ and see it completed. It reminds me of how good I am at making things happen and often helps me see bigger, more complex things through to completion with a greater sense of confidence.
Setting up a new space to write ticks all those boxes. It’s a quick win. It’s fun. It gives me a sense to have achieved something and it’s only the 3rd January…