I said I would start blogging again back in the summer. I said it over, and over again. “Write a blog post” has been on my to-do list for several months running, now. And yet.

And it’s not that I haven’t been *writing*, just that I have yet to finish writing anything I feel is worth posting on the blog. 

I suppose some of this has to do with perfectionism, and a lack of deadline. When I was writing monthly posts for Hack Library School, I knew I had a deadline I couldn’t miss, and so a lot of my inherent perfectionism just had to be laid aside. This sometimes led to mistakes or things being overlooked, which is my bad for sure. But that deadline sure did ensure that I got ‘er done.

Part of it is also burnout. Grad school torched me like dead grass in the height of a hot, dry summer and as soon as I was done and had my accepted job offer in hand, I spent two months doing as few things involving academic rigor as possible. Or anything that involved producing things, really. I’ve only recently gotten back into drawing and making art after two years of barely picking up a brush. I love making things, but the creative, inquisitive brain seems to be the first thing to go.

I heard some anecdote about an artist, I forget who, who upon starting a new sketchbook would scribble on the first page to really mess it up. They seemed to think that destroyed some of the preciousness that gets built up around drawings and other works of art, which in turn often paralyzes people, who are unable to draw at all due to fear of the drawing not turning out perfect. Well, if your first page is already wrecked, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore that the rest aren’t perfect.

This anecdote is basically why I’m writing this post – it’s the first post on this blog, and I had this idea in my head that the first post had to be Perfect (but also not Too Perfect, I didn’t want to have to worry that I’d peaked), and as nothing I ever write is perfect, I could never publish that first post. 

Thanks for reading, check back soon!

Some Things I’ve Been Noodling On, that I hope to Get Back To Writing About At Some Point:

Critical examinations of the library one-shot

Elaine Castillo’s essay collection How To Read Now

Let’s Talk About Quiet Quitting: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives

This quote, from bell hooks’ Teaching Critical Thinking:

“Instead of focusing on the commonly held assumption that we are safe when everyone agrees, when everyone has an equal time to speak, if we rather think of safety as knowing how to cope in situations of risk, then we open up the possibility that we can be safe even in situations where there is disagreement and even conflict.”