I’m not a big consumer of ‘stuff’. I don’t like shopping. I like to get by with what I have. I get anxious about the waste created when it’s time to get rid of things. But…I spend a LOT of time consuming ‘content’. Social media content, specifically. As we all know, consuming just a bit of that content leads to a never-ending stream of content (it’s designed to work that way…) and before I know it I’ve spent an hour (okay, more than an hour) with my eyes and brain in vacuum mode, sucking up all of the images, videos, words, artwork that have been created by others.
What impact does this have on my life? If I am going to spend so much of my time doing this, it’s important to me to think about this question. The answer has nuance and complexity. I gain the insights of others, but I sometimes lose the insights I was already conjuring on my own. I gain inspiration, but I lose the time to do something with that inspiration. I learn from others whose lives are different than my own, I unlearn that I might have something to teach, too.
I consume this content to the point that I am more than full, and a valve needs to be opened that will release some of what has filled me. I have discovered that the valve is attached to my creative mind. If I take in too much without releasing what has been stirred up inside, I feel restless, stressed, anxious and depleted. Creating is the release.
Over the past five years I have been writing in an on-line journal that I started with the idea of perhaps, one day, turning it into something shared with others. The journal has been my notebook for drafts of Facebook posts, the posts that have often got the most ‘likes’ in my feed. The posts that have led some of my friends to comment that I should write a book, and for me to reply…”I think there is probably a step between writing a good facebook post and writing a book…?”.
I have a lot of content in my head, and I want a clean space to deposit it. So I started this blog. Its name comes from that of my aforementioned journal. The first entry of that journal, from five years ago, can be found in About Just Typing. The posts to come will be a mish-mash of topics for now, perhaps narrowing down into something else later. I am letting it be what it is, and hope that some people will read it and gain something from it. I’m just typing.
