Looking Back, Moving Forward - Beyond the Noise of Social Media

This will be a bit more of a personal essay but I had to jump onto my beloved Substack today to chat a bit with all 15k+ of you who subscribe and enjoy my musings here. First of all, thanks so much for being here. I feel like there are so many distractions online and I battle so much with this on Substack as well. I want to login here and just see my work and all of you and your comments and direct messages to me.

Instead, I am shown hundreds of Notes from people all over the world, along with articles and musings, videos, imagery, and I’m so overwhelmed and overloaded by it that I feel like logging off and hiding most days.

When I see all of the Notes and suggestions on who to subscribe to, I get this sinking feeling that I cannot keep up with the tidal wave of people on this platform seeking connections, subscribers, and likes. I loved the early days of blogging, it was the best time on the internet in my opinion. I was around during the AOL days when I built a site using AOL Homesite. Did you have AOL too?

I was around during the beginning Flickr days where I made so many friends - Flickr and my Yahoo Groups account, along with my MySpace stalking, got me into blogging and from the day I started my blog in January 2006, I knew I’d finally found the place for me to become a fully formed writer - maybe even a professional published one - I had hoped… Maybe one day even a book author - I had dreamed.