I survived 2020 and all I got was this lousy

An old e-quaintance of mine who worked at a publishing house began holding online writing workshops during the global pandemic lockdowns. I joined in, and it helped me take my fiction writing seriously. On the one hand, despite losing my job, I could afford to...on the other hand, I didn't feel qualified to do much else ("didn't feel inclined" isn't the right phrase.) 

This year, I've gotten a few gigs, to keep the roof over my head and the groceries coming. 

And I'm here. Why am I here? I'm not nostalgic for the proto-media that is social. I used to have far too much social anxiety to bother with them. I would blog only because it was faster to type, and I figured that nobody would make anything too bad of the unimportant minutiae of my daily life that I put out there. I had no deep insights organized, no emotive clickbait writing techniques, no simmering outrage under incisive composition, no desire for validating comments about my self-taught knitting adventures or the vague descriptions of the latest peculiar dream...I just wrote everything that I noticed and everything that I remembered I'd felt. Better than a curse written on the first page of a paper diary, I figured that nobody would be arsed to read all that. I think I was right.

I rarely scrolled back to read what I'd written. Unless it were for something specific that I wanted to remember better, such as my conviction that I was dreaming up prophesies of the future—spoilers, I wasn't—I would try to imagine that I was somebody else and all I could think of while re-reading the sheer cliffs and textwalls of my forgotten entries was, "Why would you write that and post it?" Not necessarily because anything was offensive, although I'm sure some of that content was in the immature tween way of the early millennium, but more in the sense of, "Why was this documented?"

I've got to get back to doing that. It would be good to once more have just a tiny chip in the porcelain teapot of life, a little space, dedicated to complete and utter meaninglessness and free-range expression.