I've been wanting to write since a little while but whenever I sit to write a post I end up on an endless yak-shaving of making small adjustments to the blog. I know that if I wanted to optimize my blogging flow for writing I should start using something like Medium, or maybe even go back to good-ol' Wordpress.

But I don't want to increase the exposure of my readership (who are these people anyway??) to advertising, nor useless tracking, nor annoying pop-ups like "psst, you should create an account to better read". As my wise friend Luciano Ramalho says (in Portuguese), the Web is supposed to be decentralized and shouldn't be controlled by half-a-dozen tech corporations with their opaque algorithms.

That's how it's like these days, you wanted to share rambling thoughts with the world through a blog post, then you gotta choose a blogging platform, suddenly that choice becomes a political statement. So much meta-cognition, it drives me nuts sometimes... I just wanted to write!!

That's how I end up writing posts in Vim, which is okay for writing prose but it just sucks if you want to add a picture to your post. I guess this explains why my posts don't have much images these days.

I guess it is still worthwhile, because the blog is pretty snappy. Also, by not using Medium/Wordpress/whatever, I don't see user stats, which means that I don't know what posts people are accessing, I don't get comments, all those "features" that these days would mostly just give me anxiety.

For some reason, I've been finding hard to write stuff in public again. I used to be a lot braver before. Life happens, and I feel like I've grown a bit cynical, and maybe the "hopeful ramble" in the blog title isn't so hopeful anymore. And even if a lot happened in my life over the recent years and sometimes I think it could be good to share, I don't really feel like writing about it. It's like, I want to keep them mine.

I also feel like I've become increasingly self-conscious about writing over the recent years, which kinda pisses me off. "Stop editing, just write!", a brain thread of thought shouts to another. "But the fear is there for a reason" another brain thread jumps in, which gets "just worry about it later!" shouted back from first thread.

Things used to be simpler.

I figured out some time ago that I have more difficulty to visualize things than the average person. Since then, I've grown even more fond of the technique of writing to clear my thoughts. It's possibly useful to many people, considering we're all getting addicted to our screens and shit, but I realize that it's probably more relevant for some than it is for others.

In any case, narration seems to be an important tool for me. My memory is more like an audio-book than a movie. Or maybe an audio-book with an accompanying comic book with blurry drawings. It sort of blew my mind when I learned that aphantasia was a thing, and I keep remembering things that I seem to have experienced very differently than other people because of it and I didn't really understand it at the time.

Anyway, that's why I like writing. Someone already said "if you're not writing, you're only thinking that you're thinking", and it rings a bell for me. It's obviously not true (you can think in many ways), but it does feel like that in my case, clear thinking usually needs writing.

Okay, enough writing about writing. Nobody really cares. (BTW, see what I mean about the self-consciousness?)

Hopefully next time I'll have something interesting to say. Cya!