A few days ago, I found myself feeling nostalgic for a certain moment in my blogging history. A moment when everything seemed to really mesh. Thankfully, I have all of my blogs backed up as .epubs from 2020-current, so I opened up to the first entry in 2020 which started on January 8th.

I'd just come off a several month break from blogging and social media. At the time, my audience consisted of a couple of friends who'd occasionally read my blog and after years of starting and stopping, rebranding, and renaming, I had once again started over.

Hello. My name is Brandon.

You may know me as the guy who has run a couple dozen blogs over the years, and hardly ever sticks with one more than a couple of months. I’m that guy who gets excited about an idea, does a ton of writing over a few days, sends out the link to my friends, and then I quit. I usually decide I’d rather write on paper or I’m being inauthentic, because I’m censoring myself for an audience. Then, I feel bad about wasting my friends time and I convince myself I’m a shit writer and go back to doing nothing while shamefully hiding under the shadow of my tiny internet failure that no on truly cared about to begin with. How could they, I never really even started?

I went into 2020 with a plan. I created a new blog on Blogger and I gave myself some rules. I'd post at least one blog a week, and I'd keep each post under 700 words since I tend to well... not shut up sometimes. I also placed a special emphasis on keeping my blog positive, since so often my blogs turned into whiny little bitchfests about you know... feelings and what not. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but as I wrote:

I’m going to do my best to keep it positive, fun, and easy reading, but I’m sure I’ll slip into some depressive slump at some point, write about how fucked my life is and how I need to spend more time meditating, and then I won’t actually follow through with anything I wrote down. I know this, you now know this, so let’s not pretend like this blog is changing my life nor yours. It’s just exists, here in the massive depths of the interspace, between megacorporations, Russian spys, porn, and social media. This blog is equivalent to that piece of ice that you kick under the refrigerator because you are too lazy to reach down and throw it in the sink.

In those early days of 2020, I think I had finally pulled that blogging stick out of my ass. I began to accept that my blog should be a fun side-project and not some life changing or life affirming creation. By taking myself considerably less serious, it allowed for me to loosen up, let my sense of humor out, and just write. I had so much fun, I started writing daily. If there has ever been a period in my life where my blogging represented who I am, it was those first few months in 2020.

Thanks to the internet, everyone has a voice now and a lot of people are using their voices to tell you how you should be living. They’ll tell you their philosophy and techniques and a lot of us eat that shit up. We go, “Yeah, I need a new notebook with 27 different dividers, and online subscription and a $100 e-course class on how to make a to-do list.” I shit you not, I actually downloaded a book called The Checklist Manifesto. The book is 225 pages of how to make checklists and why you should make checklists. Seriously, what the fucking fuck?

So, what happened? How did I lose the plot, and why do I always come back to these first few months of 2020? Well, there were two things that changed.

1. Blogger began experiencing issues. All of my pictures disappeared and they didn't care to fix it for weeks. I got irritated with Google neglecting the platform so I moved over to Write.as, my first indie blogging platform. There, I actually developed a bit of an audience thanks to read.write.as. I started exchanging emails with other writers, and as COVID hit, more and more people flooded to the platform to express themselves and share their creations. It truly was a wonderful time, but one that dramatically shifted how I blogged.
2. As mentioned, COVID happened. If you follow my posts through 2020, I write about trying not to write about the pandemic. Then I write about struggling to not allow the negativity to slip into my life. But at the time, I was working in a hospital in a patient facing position. The fear, paranoia, ever changing rules, constant sick people, long hours, my wife losing her job, us losing our apartment and so on complicated things. The positivity I tried to lean into slowly eroded and while I wouldn't say I started blogging with a focus on negativity, I struggled to keep the smile on my face that I had approached each blog post with.

So, why am I telling you all this? Why am I taking a virtual trip down memory lane to a very different world from early 2020? Because I need to. Because I need to tap back into that same energy and I need to find my way back to that mindset.

My default is negative. I'm not a bubbly person. Don't get me wrong, I'm not like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, but I'm definitely a glass half empty person. At my core, I don't think there is anything wrong with this. It prepares me for the worst and not much disappoints me, but its beginning to weight a little heavy on me. There comes a point where even after you start avoiding the news and drama, you are still left with your own thoughts and when they are always so dark and hopeless, it doesn't leave much to live for.

Over the past month, I've cut back my TV watching and video game playing, and I've spent quite a few days and evenings alone with my thoughts. To me, I had finally reached the pinnacle. I'd shed all those things that bring me down and make me feel bad, so imagine my surprise when I didn't feel good. When daily meditation, exercise, philosophy reading, and what not didn't magically cure me. I didn't just suddenly "get happy." And after several weeks of sitting quietly with my thoughts, journaling, and doing everything right, I began to realize that maybe my own unhappiness had more to do with my outlook than the influence of other forces such as the internet, news, media, etc. We all make our own weather, and I was keeping things overcast.

Then, the other night, as I found myself spending another quiet evening waiting for peace and solace to wash over me, I started to think back to the last time I felt really good, and that's what brought me back to January 8th, 2020.

The question that remains is... is it possible? Can I recapture that magic? Things were so very different then. I had a nice emergency fund saved up, I was still pretty new in my relationship, and I hadn't given up completely on the world yet. I hadn't seen the breakdown that occurred during COVID, nor had I gone through several years of insane, mental health damaging drama. So, I must ask myself, can I reconcile current Brandon with a Brandon from the past? Can I find something to be hopeful about and can I try and be happier? That sounds like an exhausting, monumental task to even attempt, but I really think I need to try and channel that early 2020 Brandon with the Brandon of 2026 because quite frankly, I can't keep going on the way I've been going on.