It’s been a pretty quiet day. While the rain fell outside my other half holed up in the lounge doing a jigsaw, and I noodled around with this and that on the computer.
I keep coming back to that John Lennon quote recently - about life happening while you’re making other plans.
I would have loved to have been a writer.
I’ve always loved writing - just perhaps not the words that others might like to read. Take this blog for example - it continues to amaze me that people actively read it. Perhaps it has something to do with being somewhat candid and honest about the challenges I face in daily life - the loneliness of working from home, the struggle to avoid my backside growing to the size of Jupiter, and the relentless succession of chores that bookend every day.
I know writing doesn’t pay though. I think writers know that too - in their heart of hearts. Writing seems to be more of a calling than a career.
While tinkering with writing, emptying my head, and jumping down internet rabbit holes during the pandemic, I wrote some articles and published them to an online platform called “Medium” which was trying out a relatively simple remuneration model. I made bank immediately, and my head was suddenly filled with thoughts of a career self-publishing enormously successful think pieces that the unknown masses would read, share, and comment on endlessly.
Of course, that’s not what happened.
It turns out lightning strikes happen with the written word just as they do with anything else. Yes, you might enjoy your 15 minutes of fame - but repeating them is a different problem entirely.
The further I dug into the world of writing online, the more cynical I became. As soon as a platform appears that rewards popularity with money, any potential audience is rapidly supplanted by an army of machine gun journalists armed with sausage machines filled with articles mansplaining anything and everything.
Within months Medium turned into an incestuous race to the bottom of the internet - with snake oil salesmen selling their produce to each other. It was horrific, disheartening, but strangely entertaining.
I retreated to my blog. This blog.
I still write almost every day - sometimes every few days - and still find things to write about. I’m not quite sure how it works - this “journalling” lark. Especially writing a public diary. It seems both brave and foolish at the same time - in equal measure. And yet I can’t quite bring myself to stop doing it.
I sometimes wonder if my children will read this one day, and come to the realisation that Dad really didn’t know much more than them after all - he was just better at making it up as he went along than they were at the time.
Maybe that’s the lesson that all of this writing, wondering, thinking, worrying, and thinking some more teaches - that nobody really knows what they’re doing. We’re all kind of making it up as we go along - it’s just that some appear quite confident while they’re making it all up - while others are not at all.
I think I’m somewhere in the middle.