I started blogging in 2009 I think and continued on a different blog for another four years using a wordpress hosted platform. Back then, Facebook had only reached the masses for about eighteen months, maybe two years. Social media was a novelty, an unexploited paradise of consumption and audience participation that promised new and exciting ways to communicate with each other and form communities around the world. It was so different from blogging, where you simply wrote into the void. The digital equivalent of presenting to an empty lecture hall, with the hope that someone might stumble in midway through, find what you were offering of interest and decide to stay a little while.
There were no likes, no comments. No infinity feed of content to scroll forever through. There was no instantaneous dopamine hit received from algorithmic approval. The only way to check if people liked your content was to have blog comments enabled and to check back regularly or endure the pain of using Google Analytics to track site visitor stats.
These methods of audience engagement were relatively anonymous though. Commenters did not have to use their real names. Although online was a friendlier and smaller world than it is today, people were still more cautious than they were in the early nineties. Using your real name or posting personal information was still not advised.
In this older context of audience, there was no readymade society of followers hanging on your every digital release. You didn’t know if your friends followed your blog, unless they told you about something they enjoyed, usually in a face-to-face interaction or over a phone call.
You wrote a blog for a few reasons:
- You wanted to
- You had something to say
- You wanted to be a part of a digital community that coalesced around an interest or topic.
Which brings me to the point of this post. What is the purpose of my blogging today, on the 3rd February 2026?
I am at the point where I am done, on the whole, with social media. I deleted my twitter account several years ago. Linkedin in increasingly homogenous with it’s rain of “I’m delighted to announce my latest role / publication/ fart.” posts, mainly prompted by the site AI bot suggesting a post about the latest profile update a user has made. Facebook is the place that pulls me back the most, mainly because there are friends and one family member there that I only speak to on this platform. Even their number dwindles as other become disillusioned with Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
So I have decided to write for myself again. For no other reasons that I have something to say, because I want to. I want to stand at the front of a digital lecture theatre and present my thoughts, ideas and life. I hope that this will be somewhere that someone, at some time, will stop because they like what they see and what to learn more.
Part of the labour I undertake at this time is making sense of the last four months of my life. I don’t know if making sense is the same as sensemaking (perhaps this is something I might tease out later in these keyboard strokes). I don’t want to be a place, a space of performativity though. It needs to be somewhere I can be myself because I spent far too long being another person, a different facade, a mask, a facsimile of myself in hospital.
I never stimmed in hospital because of the constant surveillance. I didn’t realise until I came home and my body fizzed and popped of its own accord. Others noticed it too. The subtle trembling of my hands that weave back and forth around my body, snake-like and serpentine. All saw these all the way from Tasmania. Called them ‘wiri’. Told me about the Maori dance in which they represent the life-force of the natural world… shimmering water / heat haze / the rustling of leaves [tree family, branches of kin].
So I leave this day with a better understanding of my selfhood. My shaking, tremoring, quivering energy that sometimes I can control and which sometimes controls me. This is not something to be ashamed of. It’s not something for others to ridicule as those who were supposed to care and protect did when I was a child. This is root [energy]. This is branch [energy]. This is leaf and life and love [energy].
You simply need wisdom to recognise it.
Kiva Haikus
Suspended in still.
Awaiting growth: with tree friends.
Being myself. Finally.
Tree mothers and tree
fathers. Embrace me in their
branching lineage.
