So I’m getting some good practice with these, “hey I’m back,” posts, eh? Another four years have passed since I last wrote something here, and you know what? I’m a little disappointed in myself that I wasn’t able to naturally stay committed to writing and posting. I guess that’s life. You make time for things you really care about, and unfortunately this activity slipped down my priority list anytime something else would come up. Now, it’s not from a lack of enjoyment, but I think it comes from the all too common battle with the desire to achieve perfection.
I think about this a lot, or at least I try to be mindful about how perfectionism affects me. The last time I “came back” I redesigned my entire site so that it would look pretty to me. I liked its clean look, the minimal colours, and all of the photos. That was something I really wanted to share. Photos of wildlife, birds, planes, and gosh maybe even trains one day! Reflecting on this, I realize I was subconsciously creating a barrier for myself. I felt that a single post without an image looked odd, and so I needed to add one to everything that I wrote. Of course, I didn’t always have a photo. And so I didn’t write.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about the complexity of web design. I remember making websites when I was in middle school, and they were never complicated. They were all static web pages with some funky looking buttons and a few images. What I’ve been thinking most about is the simplicity. The lack of a requirement to steal your attention from something else. A space that used to be devoid of commercial products and the monetization of everything and anything. Simple sites that didn’t require cookie disclosures because the idea of cookies being used to track you so that it can be used by an algorithm to determine the optimal way to extract something from you wasn’t commonplace yet. I miss that flavour of the internet. It felt more organic. It felt human. It’s the small web ↗ that I miss.
I’ve been falling in love with the internet all over again. I really enjoy reading what other people share for the joy of it, and not for financial gain. So I decided to scrap the heavy polish of a bloated WordPress site template and go back to a static site. It’s simple, clean, and it loads pretty fast now too! I took inspiration from many different sites. Blending ideas together to create my own style. I really like how it has all turned out, and I think the great thing about it is that I don’t feel like everything needs to be polished to a mirror finish. I feel like I’ve knocked another brick out of that perfectionist wall that I find myself pushing against.
So here’s my first post back — again. An imperfect post without a perfectly curated photo at the top. I want to write because I love to share my experiences or really anything that I’m interested in at the moment. I can’t say how often I’ll write, or how long my posts will be, but I’m sure my next post won’t start with another long-overdue greeting.