Starting Over

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I Want To Start Over.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog going forward. As those who have been with me from the beginning know, I’ve had this blog for six and a half years. Which is to say, I started this blog when I was in fifth grade… and, (at least mostly when you look at the big picture), maintained it almost solidly until I was nearly through with my junior year of high school.
As you can imagine, that’s a lot of growing and maturing. Some of you may not know this, but when this blog first began, it was a place where I’d post pretty much every single day, about “How My Day Went”. And I kid you not, as indicated by the quotations, that’s precisely what I titled every single one of those posts. In addition, I don’t think I really got it right on the first post I ever wrote. It was titled “My First Post!!! Welcome”, and consisted of the following two sentences:
“hi everyone and welcome to my weblog (or blog)! This is a blog about Steven Daugherty! hope you enjoy!”
It wasn’t until 2013 that the blog really began to take off. I stopped with the repetitive “How My Day Went” posts, switching over to the more conventional periodic update, also adding more site content. And for the past four years, that’s been the pattern this site has followed.
As I said though, I’ve recently been doing a lot of thinking. The result is that a lot of that content has been removed, though obviously not the several hundred blog posts – and even though there exists the option to wipe them all out of existence with essentially one click, I don’t particularly feel like doing so. Deleting a bunch of pages was one thing, but given the fact that most of my recent posts have taken around a half hour to write, I can only guess at the total amount of time I spent writing all of them.
I did this partly because I feel like I’ve grown out of some of that which inspired the removed content, though chiefly because of the fact that I feel like making a fresh start. From trying to establish schedules of when to blog, to (without saying so) trying to gear my posts towards specific subject matters such as coding and technology or life by making a bunch of consecutive posts about them, I just feel like all the recent reforms I’ve tried to make to this blog have fallen short. I just feel like I’ve been doing the blogging thing all wrong; trying to make it into something it can never be. Maybe it’s because I’ve striven to write every x days or, and this is what I personally believe, I’ve tried to create an image of myself that only partially exists.
Most of the time I present a witty persona, or write about something technological, or write about something great I’ve learned or achieved, or perhaps discuss life in a superficial way that generally describes only the highlights and the good things. Sometimes though, I feel like this is only stagnating my blog, even if it is providing readers with something they can enjoy, because it only gives me temporary enjoyment.
I am not implying that my life is bad below the surface, that I do not enjoy technology, and that I have been completely unhappy with my blog. After all, if these were the case, I hardly believe it would have been possible for me to sustain a blog for several years in those conditions. All I’m saying is… maybe I should write more freely. Maybe I should write whatever comes to mind, and stop attempting to craft it into conformity. That doesn’t mean this blog is going to get all depressing and dark or anything, it just means that I’m not always witty, geeky, and enthusiastic, and I think that in order to succeed, I should write even when I am not those things.
So welcome, all three hundred sixty of you, to my blog. I’m starting over. No limits this time.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.