What do I call the entries that I write here? Notes? Posts? Thoughts? Or does that even matter? This is my blog, a space, as I noted earlier, for the “quick posts journaling whatever is at the top of my mind”.
I don’t call them quick posts because they are less formal. Instead, they are less formal because I want them to be. Because I write them as short, quick posts. They need not be correct. They need not be corrected.
Manu wrote recently about how he dislikes editing old blog content.
[A] personal blog can and should be a representation of who you are at different points in time. We change, we grow and our thoughts and ideas grow and change with us. And it’s important to have testament of that.
I, too, am firmly in Manu’s camp. If I were to improve my old posts, I would never write anything new. The ideas are shitty, and the way I wrote them is shittier. Nevertheless, I still stand by all of those posts. Sure, I may not endorse any of those views today. But they are the views of my younger self.
The world around me has changed over the years. So has the world within me. It is only natural then that how I look at and understand the world has evolved too.
I recently observed my writing may have gained correctness at the cost of courage. Colin had an interesting thought responding to the post.
I’m not sure about it being a lack of courage, rather an increased reticence stemming from a low-level, underlying fear that now pervades the web.
Is it the fear of being wrong that has made me change what and how I write? Sure, that too. Whatever the reason, I am not the same self I was a few years ago. Why, then, should I ever correct what he thought and wrote? It helps neither the reader nor me.