Bravery of the Personal Blog
I've had a particularly bad time these past couple months. Work has been stressful, generally due to things completely outside of my control. You'd think, four years into my specialized non-profit work, I'd be better at weathering the bad times, but I'm still getting the hang of it. In particular, decisions (or rather, intentional lack of decisions) at the federal level 1 have meant that every day of my job I'm dealing with new instructions. This is only compounded by the recent realization that I have very little control at work despite being assigned a great deal of responsibility. It makes it hard to do good work when, somehow, it feels more effective to do nothing than to try.
My wife and I often repeat this Bilbo Baggins quote to each other: "I feel thin, sort of stretched like butter scraped over too much bread." I'd gotten time off for Christmas, but it didn't feel like enough. I took four days. Four days isn't much to recover from a year of mounting burn out, but it's the best I can do right now while still being responsive to work.
This morning was the first time I felt "normal" in too long. I brewed a cup of decaf coffee and read a little from a magazine I got weeks ago.2 Then, as has been my unconscious instinct, I grabbed my phone and got onto Reddit in between stories. For once, I found something good: a comment from someone sharing that they'd be doing play reports of their Solo RPG Project on a blog called "Lands Beyond Larm". I really enjoyed what I found, especially catching up with their (now daily! in 2026) play report. But there was this funny little Bear emoticon at the bottom, which I couldn't help but follow, only to find this whole little micro-community.
I found so much joy in clicking between the "Trending" posts in the discovery feed3 and reading through bits of people's blogs. There were TTRPGs, end-of-year wraps for 2025 and hopes for the new year, tech talk that was way beyond my single year in a CompSci major, and deeply personal things. One post in particular stood apart for me, the very first post of Scholarch's: "I am blogging to save my soul". What they wrote was so simple, yet felt courageous. I'm dissatisfied with my life, too, or at least parts of it - especially the chasm between what I do and what I want to do. But rather than just shout into the void, they chose to blog into it. I think they have the right idea.
Plus, who knows - some other rando like me might stumble upon this blog and decide to take up the keyboard as an act of hope and joy.
Yes, I'm based in the USA. In particular, the Great Plains of the Midwest USA.↩
The magazine is "The New Territory", their October 2025 edition, "Tending." This was the first edition of the magazine I've gotten, but I love it dearly. I plan to write a response to it when I've gotten to read a little more.↩
Shout out to "When the Internet Felt Like Freedom" for hooking me and Frances' links page for providing me the morning's the rabbit hole.↩