On what to write

Nicolas Magand who runs The Jolly Teapot recently published a post about the process of developing ideas for blog posts, the importance of reading, and the need for a focus on blog content.

When my day job consumes a little too much of my brain, I find myself incapable of reading, let alone spending time articulating my thoughts into written words.

I can definitely relate to that feeling. I work as a video editor and part of my job involves going through comments, client feedback, and producer input on my edits. After eight hours of staring at a screen, the last thing I want to do is read or write. Instead, I often find myself scrolling through social media feeds or watching videos. Recently, one of the companies we work with liked an edit I did for one of their videos, and now the producers request me specifically for their projects. While it’s great to be recognized for my work, the high standards they expect from me can be exhausting. I spend hours double-checking and revising their feedback, which can be quite draining. Don’t get me wrong, I chose this job and I really enjoy it. Although, at times, I do feel like I’m not being compensated fairly for the amount of work I do. But I guess that’s a story for another time.

When it comes to the topics I cover on this blog, I focus mostly on things that I have an deep interest for, namely media and technology and their numerous meeting points like social platforms, newsletters, and blogs. I have the hope and the ambition that the commentary I add to these stories is the main value of my writing, the main purpose of the Jolly Teapot.

I’ve been blogging for a while now, but I’ve only recently committed to really writing something on my blog. Before, it was just an introduction to myself and some random musings. For some reason, I decided to unpublish my WordPress website, and now I can’t revive my account because I forgot my password and the email I used. As a kid who grew up during the height of Yahoo! Messenger, MySpace, and Friendster, I had a lot of accounts and numerous email addresses because I was always forgetting them. I used to write them down in a Word document, but I was careless with my files and used to hide them away because we had a shared computer. That changed in high school when I got my own laptop.

The struggle right now is what to write. Cool, I made a blog, did most of December 2022 tweaking the code, spent months and years looking for inspiration… but what to write? I wrote about struggling and trying to write last year when this blog was just barebones. Here I am 15 months later, still struggling.

I found myself stuck last April, like staring at an empty Obsidian note stuck. So I decided to find inspiration by reading more personal blogs. Finding inspiration is real hard. *ba dum tss*. Why did I choose this path? Then I realized that maybe I should just write whatever I want. After all, it’s my blog, and I should be free to express myself.

As someone who is new to writing, I’m usually hesitant to share the things I create — my photographs, short films, videos, writings, and more. But it recently dawned on me that I need to muster the confidence to reveal my true self because I don’t want to be a coward. Sharing my thoughts and publishing them means everything to me, even if I don’t have an audience. I’m at least putting myself out there and trying.