It’s strange how quickly 2024 is disappearing. Ever since the pandemic began, my sense of time has felt slightly broken, as if the usual markers stopped working.
It’s almost 5 a.m. in Beijing. My body clock has been off lately, and after falling asleep a few hours ago, I woke up from a slightly odd dream. It feels like one of those moments when writing something makes sense.
This year, I updated my blog more often than ever before. But over the past few months, that pace has dropped again.
A lot of that has to do with how life has been recently. I’ve been working from home, which means fewer encounters, fewer new impressions, and not much pressure. Also, not much money. Quite a few times I’ve wanted to write something, only to give up because I didn’t have a long enough stretch of quiet time alone, or because my creative energy felt thinner than before, or simply because there was no idea I could immediately reach for.
At the same time, I started keeping a diary. I’m not very interested in taking photos, but it still feels necessary to leave something behind for my future self. So I began recording what I do and what I think each day in Notion, plainly and without polishing it into anything more than a straightforward log. Once I started doing that, I felt even less motivation to put everyday fragments of life on the blog.
That has made the role of the blog feel blurrier than before. I used to use it for bits of daily life and for whatever thoughts I wanted to keep. It had also been a long time since I’d written any kind of rant, though recently I found myself complaining about Pinduoduo again because I genuinely couldn’t stand what I was seeing. Even then, there still aren’t that many things I actually feel compelled to rant about.
After turning it over in my head, I keep coming back to the same thought: who cares. A blog doesn’t necessarily need a clearly defined position. Positioning only really matters when there’s an audience to position yourself for. Most of the time, this is something I’m writing for myself anyway, so why force a label onto it?
If you start writing, that already counts as success. Whether the result is good or bad, it’s still yours. There’s nothing there that needs to be defended.