Like riding a bike?

I'm weirdly nervous about the prospect of blogging again. I thought Twitter was ideal for me, someone who stifles their creative instincts with reflexive overthought. If I'm going to toss my every thought into a mental rock-tumbler and grind it until it emerges as a shiny gem (or more often, something small and dull and not worth keeping) it seemed wise to limit myself to a sentence or two at a time. However, I do seem to find myself spending a lot of that effort in compacting those thoughts rather than honing them, per se, and I've been known to give up if something seems irreducible. That feels a lot like missing the point. At least I've never sunk so low as to write a thread or post a picture of some text, but when I see other people do that I instinctively cry "stop working round Twitter's only fucking feature and get a damn blog!" And then I find myself thinking wistfully of the olden days when we all had blogs, and how every social media innovation since then has been a downgrade (Real names! Opaque security settings! Reading lists curated by devious algorithms! Current affairs! Hot takes! Ads! Ownership by one or other species of utter bastard! Becoming an unholy combination of consumer and product, like a one-man Human Centipede!)

So, you know, I thought I'd have a stab at being the change I want to see in the world, dust off the old Dreamwidth account, and see what happens. My LiveJournal was littered with decisions to start blogging again and I'm certainly not convinced that this will be different, but I'm also not convinced that it need be the same. I think, for example, that I have a clearer idea of what this is for (though I'd be hard-pushed to actually define it.) I'm also better at mental framing, I think. I came to think of blogging as something that I was always either doing or failing to do, an endless leaden obligation. I hope that this time I'll be able to treat it as something I sometimes want to do and enjoy doing. If each post is like that, there needn't be a bigger picture, just as you might enjoy noodling on the guitar to yourself (and any mates who choose to listen) without ever wanting or needing to become an expert or to produce an album or whatever.