Where to begin!?

It’s been so long, but I don’t think of this site as over. As difficult as I find it, or as uninspired as I am, I can’t bring myself to call this a failed experiment and give up on it – the intention is always to return here again.

As always, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Or the existant. I find myself believing that I can hold off writing while I build a new site theme, or switch from Hugo, or create something from scratch that meets all my needs.

So this is a new post, on my old theme, on clunky Hugo, manually uploaded like it has been for years, and I’m going to try to keep writing even when I would rather do it in another way.

“So what brings me back?” – I don’t hear you ask – and I answer: “nothing in particular”.

I feel lonely I guess. And not for lack of friends or company IRL, but because I sorta impulsively “noped out” of social media completely in a way I’ve never done before and lost a bunch of connections I value way more than I even realised I did.

Mastodon and aus.social were my homes for a while and I have to stress it wasn’t anyone or anything there that killed it for me. I was in a fragile state of mind when I left and I just wasn’t coping with my own self-imposed idea of what I wanted to be in that space. I’m back on elsewhere now, just to keep up with the tiny number of people I truly miss, but if you want to reach out, reach out here from now on.

I’m giving myself a theme this year: “out of my shell”, and in short I mean to push a little outwards to some of the goals I’ve put on hold or felt I was too unskilled to try. I have felt myself becoming more insular over the last three years and it’s left me feeling powerless, and helpless. So I’m not making grand sweeping goals, but I am publishing a new post for the first time in over a year¹.

I do miss interacting with people, so if you see this post out there in the rss æther please drop me an email if you can be bothered², or one day I might have a more public social media account you can say hello to. One reason I want to revamp my site is to get comments or post-pingbacks working like the good old days so I can use this as my outlet and still hear back from people.

I hope your holiday and new year have been joyful and relaxing and I hope to hear from you as I hope you’ll hear more from me this year!