Skip to main content

Dr. Strangeblog or: How I (sort of) Learned to Stop Worrying About Writing Stuff Down.

So I've thought about blogging for a long time.  Then the anxiety hits.

"What do I even write about?"
"What if I dork it up?"
"What's my brand?"

That last one has always bothered me.  I was late to Twitter because I felt I needed a brand.  Like, did Twitter really need another user that just retweets stuff?

Then it was Tuesday and there was a new John video on vlogbrothers.


Much like John, if you move my frame ever so slightly it's also just toys.

One line though stuck out to me in big bold (word) font: "But in telling the truth you choose among many true stories which true story to tell..."

I'm sure this happens to some people, but my Twitter drafts are a graveyard of posts looking for a truth.  Not like #FakeNews but how do I frame my social self as the truth?   Does it relate too much to my personal interests (as opposed to my professional persona)? How does this represent the narrative I try to put out?  What even is my narrative, or do I even need one?

The line reminded me of one of my favorite posts from Dean Shareski, one that if you've seen my Twitter feed or read any of this post you'd see that I never embraced in practice until now - How to Become a Brand. Or Not.  I'm not going to summarize it here, you should probably just read it, but it helped me come to the realization that there probably isn't a right way to do this.

So this is it.  No right way to be found, just my way with a lot of run-on sentences with too much, or too little, punctuation followed by some very short ones.  All in the hopes of just doing something.  Making a change.  Striving to be an internet user instead of an internet reader.

It's not anything fancy and I'm not promising anything regular or that I'm going to be better at Twitter, but I do hope that this is a space where I can at least write down words and maybe share some resources while I'm at it.  For giggles, I counted how many revisions I made to this post to better frame it: 27.  Thanks for reading. 
#Brands.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Poetry is Poop"

Those are the words some kid scrawled across a nearby desk in my 11th grade English class. For some reason, those words stuck with me for the last however many years and not the words of the many poets I should have  been reading instead. Speaking ignorantly, poetry is just songs without music - right? Should be right up my alley. (I understand these are different things but are also interrelated. Don't @ me) 11th grade English is lost to me (sorry, Mrs. Kanowith). I remember those three words, that we read Death of a Salesman  and watched.... Mulan, maybe? But poetry? I guess we covered it, I mean, why else would those words exist drilled in my brain? The whole point is that a) I am an idiot for not paying attention those years ago and b) I don't know anything  about poem structure. Turns out b is less important to getting started than I thought it would be. That, or I actually remember more about it than I think I do. I've found the Academy of American Poets ...