After having gone through the longest blogging hiatus I can remember in the 13 years of regular posting I have done through multiple blogs, I guess I can now say it’s a good time for a hard reset. A new start. After all, it’s been nearly 8 months since the last article I put together over here and it just feels very weird. Like I am no longer the person who used to write over here regularly back in the day. Like I have lost? both my blogging voice and style. Like something has been missing and it’s now a good time to, finally, get it back. It does feel like a reboot of sorts, I must confess. An opportunity to perhaps resume my blogging mojo right on the brink of celebrating the 10th year anniversary of this blog later on this year and, this time around, make it stick. But will I be able to though? Will I be capable of coming back in full force to one of my all time favourite Social Web related activities? I don’t know, who knows… At this point in time though, it just feels like an exciting new beginning … and one which I have been waiting for, apparently, a long long time…
The thing is throughout all of these recent past months I have missed blogging a great deal. Writing in the long form is an art, no matter what people tell you about it otherwise. At times, it did feel as if part of my extended brain decided to live a slow and rather painful death, without asking for help, since the motivation to come back has been pretty much intact all along, but both my work as a freelancer and my personal life had other plans, week after week, month after month, till today. I am rusty though. I can feel it. Big time. Words that once used to come out pretty easily no longer do so. Now I have to think twice, or even thrice, before a sentence comes out and makes sense. I guess my muscle brain is no longer used to writing in the long form and snacking around on social networking sites is, finally, taking its toll. It needs to stop. I need to stop it and focus back on writing more long-form. And this time around make it work, if anything, for my own sake and sanity 😉
A new beginning, indeed! That’s what it feels like at the moment. Both terrifying and exciting at the same time. A reboot where I may need to re-discover both my, long lost, blogging voice and style. One blog post at a time. Paragraph by paragraph, step by step, figuring out whether I’m still made up of that thing we used to call bloggers, or not. Remember how we used to introduce ourselves back in the good old days before social networking tools kicked in?
I want to come back to blogging. I really do. I have been missing it more than whatever I could have anticipated it in the past and I just can’t explain anymore why it took me so long to come back. I simply have run out of excuses to try to explain it, even for myself. And I have kept failing miserably day in day out. It’s been quite a surreal experience overall to have blogged for nearly 13 years and spend nearly 8 months now with nothing at all. Like taking a sabbatical of sorts, although it’s now time to come back. Can I say I lost the way? Can I say I desperately want to get it back? Will I be capable of getting it back? Will I find the path again to blogging on a regular basis? Or will that same path re-find me again?
I don’t know. I seriously don’t have the faintest of ideas, but I am certainly going to give it a try. Why not? At this point in time there are far many more questions than answers I can offer popping inside my head and perhaps the only thing I can do is dive right in, have a play, unlearn, relearn and iterate again and see where it would take me. Something tells me the person who used to blog over here on a regular basis before the beginning of this year is someone completely different to who I am today. I sense things will be quite different. Substantially different. We’ll have to find out, eventually. But, at the same time, I’m pretty excited about coming back and resume this blogging journey into the unknown. As you can imagine, I have got tons of stuff I would want to write about. Loads of ideas, experiences, insights, things I am doing for both work and in my personal life and somehow I feel I’m just going back to basics, to that nerve-wrecking experience of online publishing with intent, to the bare essentials of what blogging was all about when I first got started nearly 13 years ago: Start now and write!
Oh, and keep writing over and over again. Never, ever, stop writing in the long-form! No matter how good and nurturing the snacking around through social networking sites may well have been so far. It’s now a good time to go for the whole meal without forgetting the lovely dessert, of course!
I am ready, are you?
You never left, but we all need down time to recharge our minstrels and muses and regain that energy that we had at one time. I know my blogging is down too, but that has been a mixture of work, family and life. But i have guest blogged, tried Medium and Linkedin for posts as well as elsewhere and written quite a bit internally, as you did at IBM, some of which may see the light of day outside the firewall.
So, what we all want to know is what have you been doing and what/where can we find you in the future?
Hi Keith, many thanks for the kind feedback and for the lovely comments! Yes, it’s good to be back and I am certainly in full agreement with you about the need for some downtime to re-think and re-purpose things a bit, both at work and in our personal lives. I guess my blogging hiatus was a bit longer than I anticipated, but I’m now glad it’s over and back to normal!
Yes, there are tons of different blog articles I am thinking about putting together and share across and it’s funny you should mention that because the next one will be *exactly* about that: “what/where can we find you in the future?”. For the other question, the next round of blog posts will detail what I have been up to and where it is like the life of an independent adviser around Social Business and Digital Transformation. It’s now coming up to 2 years and lots of different things have happened. So time to shake it off and blog about that, too!
Stay tuned, please, and many thanks again for dropping by and for the lovely re-welcome into the Internet Blogosphere 😀 hehe
From where you stand, from what you’ve reached, you always start from a higher plateau of sensemaking. Your writing will reflect this, I’m sure. Looking forward to the continued journey.
Awww, what a fantastic comment, Joachim! Many many thanks for sharing it along and for dropping by! I think you are absolutely spot on with your thoughts shared above in terms of where we are and where we are heading and I’m more than happy to continue reflecting on it and see how we could all collectively make sense of it all. It’s been a fascinating few months since the last blog post I put together, so lots more to share, ponder and muse about! Hang in there, I am not going anywhere anymore 😀