An even less belated blog-day.

A year ago at this time, I expressed optimism that this would be the year that this long period where I’ve felt like I’ve completely wasted my life would come to an end. That… has not happened.

I had grand plans for what to do with Da Blog in 2024, ranging from completing series that I hadn’t finished to starting new ones. I even had an idea to start a podcast, representing the biggest evolution of my “brand” since I wrote my book in 2015. Before, during, and after the election, I wanted to make posts exploring what went wrong in American and global politics for things to get to the point where a Donald Trump could get within a thousand miles of the White House once, let alone three times, let alone win the popular vote – including some posts I’ve been sitting on since his first campaign in 2016, if not longer. It would close the loop on the core issue that’s been the monkey on my back for the past eight years.

Instead, this is only the 31st post since my last blog-day post, the lowest total in three years but still a step ahead of the nadir of my productivity. The podcast involved way more work than I was comfortable with putting in, but the politics posts were a real disappointment for me. At least in 2016, even though I didn’t write many posts before the election, I got in a decent number of posts after it, including ones that went pretty far in-depth, despite also juggling the Flex Schedule Watch. This year, my last politics-related post was published the day before the election. I even tried to come up with a new strategy to commit to doing a certain amount of writing every day, but that fell apart remarkably quickly. I don’t know how much of it is my sleep schedule still being out of whack, certain other activities falling at awkward times, continuing to hold myself to too high a standard for how alert I need to be to write at the standard I’d like, having too many frivolous activities on my plate, if I’m just not in the right place to put the sort of energy into writing posts that would be necessary to maintain the pace I want to, or if there’s something psychologically wrong with me on a deep level, or even just that I’ve grown too old, even at only 36, to maintain the posting levels of Da Blog’s halcyon days. What I do know is that I think I absolutely need therapy, or some sort of professional help, if I’m ever going to get back to the level of productivity I want.

Year Eighteen of Da Blog marked a decade since I moved to Los Angeles with my dad, meaning more than half the time since Da Blog launched has been in LA – a move that was supposed to allow me to focus on Da Blog full-time, but has only really been productive for the first year and a half while I was writing the book, and even that wasn’t up to the level I’d like. I do intend to get some political posts in between now and the inauguration, but if I haven’t done any work on them up to this point there’s little realistic reason to think another month will be much of an improvement, aside from the Flex Schedule Watch ending for the season (I hope to get the Week 16 post up in the next 24 hours). The one source of optimism, besides my renewed commitment to getting some sort of help to make me more productive, is that my thinking about politics ended up pushing me in the direction of a larger project I hinted at in this post, but that won’t necessarily result in a burst of new posts in the short term and I’m not sure how willing or able I am to put in the consistent work on it I’d like.

I’m feeling like I’m entering Year Nineteen with less false optimism about my ability to pull myself out of my almost decade-long funk on my own. Whether that’s a good thing, because it’ll lead me to get the help I need, or a bad thing, because it’ll lead me to succumb to despair and frustration at my inability to live up to my own image of myself, is something only time will tell. Either way, this stands to be a pivotal year for Da Blog and my life.

Leave a Comment