One more time around the sun.
I’m not going to do an end-of-year reflection of substance here, though that’s not to say I’m not doing any end-of-year reflection. This is a personal blog, yes—but I think I want to draw some sort of line between the public-personal and the private-personal. Besides, I’m not sure anyone much is reading this thing anymore, and those few who are still reading are probably not doing so in hope of a detailed inventory of my navel.
It’s been a challenging but nonetheless transformative year, and next year promises to be another such. Narrating the development of what we might call my professional persona is the point of my weeknotes at Worldbuilding Agency. As much as I have come to deeply resent the necessity of the development of a personal brand as an adjunct to my actual work, there’s no point in pretending that necessity isn’t real—and, as the establishment of that practice has shown, it’s not without compensatory benefits.
But that resentment also demands that I be the change I want to see, and take back some of myself for myself, if you see what I mean? My withdrawal from social media was never merely symbolic, but nonetheless I have come to see it as signifying something larger than itself: a reestablishment of a distinction between the social and the personal which has been lost, very much to the detriment of both spheres. I only wish I had done it sooner—because it has enabled me to get a much clearer view of where I am, where I want to go, and how I might try to get there.
Which is to say: I have a lot of plans, but many of them are quite vague, and that category very much includes the plans for this blog, which boil down to “doing something different”, or perhaps just “doing something differently”, if that’s a distinction with a difference. I guess we’ll see.
Anyway: this is by way of wishing you a happy solstice, whoever you may be.
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