Writing is a lost art

Maybe it's Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Tumblr. Or TikTok. Nobody blogs anymore. People who have something to say have stopped writing and instead are limiting themselves to photographs and 280 characters. Maybe they all moved on to podcasting. Maybe people who liked to read are listening, instead, to podcasts and Audible books. Whatever the cause, the blogoshpere has become a barren cyber landscape of abandoned blogs.

I'm still here, sort of. In 2011, I felt like my blog was home to perhaps too many thoughts, and I was starting to ramble. I gave myself the assignment of joining Twitter as a means of forcing myself to express my thoughts in 140 characters or less. What I didn't know was that Twitter is a bizarre, addictive bubble of nonstop interaction that seems tailor-made for the ADHD brain. I love it there. I hate it there.

In 2020, I'm planning to spend more time here. Writing is much better for me than whatever it is Twitter does to my brain.

An observation

Over the last couple of weeks, I saw people posting lots of things online about what their decade looked like. Many talked about the milestone achievements and major life changes they had seen between 2009 and 2019. I couldn't come up with anything of note that I had done in the last decade, so I decided to read this blog from 2009 to present.

First observation: I was a better writer ten years ago.

Second observation: Given the odyssey of health related issues I was trying to navigate in 2009, I'm surprised things turned out reasonably well. Also, I inadvertently figured out the  answer to much of what was wrong when I started this blog--and I wrote about it a full two years before a doctor figured it out. The thing is, my memory issues were so severe at the time, that when I was finally correctly diagnosed with a B-12 deficiency, I had completely forgotten that this had been my own conclusion in early 2007. Mind blown. Trust your own instincts. Float your theories to the doctor when you have them. I now wonder how much pain and true suffering I could have avoided if I had simply mentioned it to a doctor that my overall symptoms appeared to be pernicious anemia.

So much wasted time and money trying to figure out the wrong things.