I took a week off, now I ramble about breaks from blogging

As I’m sure nobody has notice, I didn’t post anything this past week. There are a couple of reasons for this. The tail end of the week was mostly due to the fact that I was suffering from a bout of self inflicted food poisoning, which knocked me on my ass for a for 2.5 days. The first half of the week though. It simply came down to a lack of enthusiasm.

I’ve previously said I’d make more of an effort to blog more about the act of blogging. It appears my initial misgivings about this being one step too self indulgent than I was happy with. Which is silly considering this entire website is an practice in self indulgence.

The thing is though, I’ve seen enough other writers out there talking about how they deal with the never ending need to keep up a schedule, as well as keep the act of blogging in their own mind. And how, if not dealt with properly, could lead to the dreaded hiatus, which is usually a coin flip between an actual break and the first step in just falling away from blogging altogether.

Now, I’m not an especially superstitious person. But still, I never like assigning labels to things like that. Adding a sense of finality to anything kind of scares the crap out of me. I notice it in my real life too, like when I’ve parted ways with people due to work, I’ve never been comfortable with the word “goodbye”. Rather I’ll avoid saying anything with such finality, and instead simply say “see you around”.

I feel similarly about terms like hiatus, especially when I feel like it can be interpreted as code for… I’m not going to say giving up because that seems to harsh, but simply moving on. I felt the same way about the concept of a new year’s resolution, as I felt it was always setting yourself up for failure. Something I did make an effort to get past by making a resolution on this very site at the start of the year.

One I’d kind of forgotten about, which kind of proves my point, although I’ve managed to keep it through no conscious effort of my own so far.

What the point I’m trying to make? Well, despite my best intentions, if I were to ever actually fall away from this blog, for all the reasons stated above, I probably wouldn’t give any warning. This past week was tough for me creatively. Having fallen into something of a groove, mostly writing episode reviews and becoming more structured in the type of content I was writing, I started to feel a little burned out.

As much as I love Demon Slayer and making those title cards, writing about it week to week dulls my enthusiasm for it, especially for a show that’s going to be running for over 12 weeks. The problem is though, those individual episode write-ups end up being some of my more popular content. The monkey’s paw is real and I’m living on it.

Plus, simply writing reviews of individual episodes puts me in a reactionary mindset that stops me from thinking about other kinds of content that I actually do enjoy writing. Everything becomes me thinking I have to publish my take on everything while it’s topical rather than thinking about anything on a deeper level.

It’s this type of thing that has caused me to go silent on this blog in the past, for months at a time. Thankfully, my work ethic is much better than it used to be, and a week’s break was enough for me to get past whatever stupor I was feeling and force myself in front of my Macbook again.

There are a lot of reasons for people to fall away from their blogs, I only listed a couple as my excuses. And so many of them will vanish with the idea that they’re merely going on a hiatus. Me personally, I’ll most likely drop off the face of the earth and pretend my blog doesn’t exist rather than deal with the fact that I haven’t updated it. Hence my earlier mention of my problems with finality and things ending.

I honestly don’t know what kind of stuff I’ll be writing going forward, whether I’ll keep up individual episode reviews or even if I’m going to keep posting everyday. I’m just going to spend a little time easing myself back in and see if my enthusiasm comes back or not. I don’t want to feel burnt out again almost right away after taking a break.

Anyway, this was mostly a rambling collection of my thoughts and feeling right now was I still have a mild fever. I’ll get something posted again tomorrow and hope people haven’t gotten bored of me in the week I was away.