Do I belong here?
For years I have had a blog of some sorts – I love to write, even if it is to myself. My main reason for having a blog was to document the things I had made; I love to sew and knit.
Then social media came into flavour and blogs went by the wayside. Well they did with my creator friends and Instagram took over.
I played along, posting all sorts of things with my personal life and creating mashing into one.
Then I got bored with it all – the posting that is, not the making. I stopped posting, along with the endless scrolling; it sucked up sooo much time that it stopped me from doing things I loved to do or things I should be doing.
But whilst scrolling through Facebook a couple of months ago, an article from Mark Manson popped on my feed where he pointed me to a book that he recommended – Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I knew I needed to read it, so I bought it and read it.
Cal is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and currently writes about the distracted world (and other interesting stuff).
I could not put this book down – it was such an eye opener. I am currently following his 30 day programme where you set yourself rules, or what he calls “operating procedures” around things such as social media, streaming, gaming etc. When and where you can use them for example.
He explains that this is not a detox but a way of getting you comfortable with the things you have put in place, that when you get back “online”, you do it under your terms and only for your benefit.
So I have removed Instagram and Facebook from my phone as well as my iPad. I can only access these on my desktop computer and only when I need to find recipes (I get my meal prepping ideas for breakfast and lunch from Instagram) or check a couple of groups I am responsible for. So far I have not missed them.
I am also not allowing myself to sit on the couch and just watch TV. If I do, I must be doing something else at the same time such as knitting or embroidery. I am currently moving my sewing pattern stash from Airtable to a specific stash app, which I can do on my iPad so this is getting this done which I have wanted to do for ages.
But I digress – sort of. Through this I also shut down a blog that I started ages ago, which I had let languish and was costing me a bomb. I then set about trying to a cheaper alternative.
I stumbled upon Substack, but I find this too hard. Hard in the sense that you have to pay for most things and it was hard to find what you were interested in as the writers would only give you a snippet of their works, then you had to fork out to read their full posts.
Then today I plugged into Google what is the best platform for blogging and voila found Write.As amongst others. I was nearly going to go with Squarespace but had to slap myself there – I would be back where I started $$ wise.
So after a few checks, I have decided to give this space a go along with Mastedon (trying to get my head around that one). So do I belong here? I am not sure, but I will give it a go, even if it is just me and the crickets.
Hubbie and I moved to regional NSW a couple of years ago and I am just now starting the garden, so will talk about the progress there. I will also chat about my crafts that I enjoy; sewing and knitting at least.
Let’s see how I go.
speak soon.
Your friend – Stephanie