For the longest time, I’ve wanted to start a blog. And by start, I mean do more than pick a template, create a single post, scrap a couple drafts, then completely drop it upon remembering that my personal project attention span lasts about 3 hours.
Sadly, my meditative coloring hobby went the way of my many previous blog attempts. I love those Stabilo pens though.
Maybe it is because I can be somewhat of a dilettante. But to that self-accusation, I offer up an alternative explanation. My curiosity and impatience spur me to move onto the next topic that fascinates me. I then dive into that, fully committed for 1-2 months, and again, find myself completely transfixed by another topic all together. Obviously, this is why I work in advertising.
“But Ellie,” I say to myself as I walk around my neighborhood, clean the house, or involve myself in some other ‘inspiring’ procrastination activity, “you love writing, and you LOVE telling people what you think. Why haven’t you started that god damn blog already? Also, you talk to yourself a lot. Maybe you should see someone about that.”
So time and time again, I find myself trying still to 'get into it.' Re-templating, re-registering domains, drafting my personal content strategy...I should by all means be my own media conglomerate by now. But today, after chewing on this particular topic a lot recently, I finally had my moment of clarity. My Eureka/lightbulb/flash of insight that my industry so worships and relies upon.
It dawned on me that the typical structure of a blog is an individual's accumulation of their own answers to questions of varying importance, such as:
- How to look like you’re having fun on Instagram
- 10 ways to make your food look better than it tastes
- This is the reason Millennials are so cheap/entitled/enter-derogatory-term-here
- Here's why you suck at your job
- This is how you should attachment-parent your furchild
They all give us the answers, to one degree or another. But most of the time, I don't have the answers yet, and as a strategist, my focus is always on finding and asking the right questions. And what's more, I don't want other peoples' explanations. My personality is such that I must figure it out on my own (my apologies to those who have attempted to teach me to drive a manual transmission).
I literally just went through my room and found every notebook, notecard and scrap of paper that I had handy when I had a question. Gay barbies? Zombie survival style? Organizing methods are yet another topic on which I have many questions.
Because why are things the way they are? Why have we created a political race between a billionaire celebrity and a college professor, yet hate literally the only candidates that might actually be qualified? How has Silicon Valley become such an icon for success yet perpetuates the social issues that we use their platforms to speak out against? Why do we love to hate to love Instagram and every other social platform? Why do people dislike animals with either too many or too few legs?
And today, finally, as I shuffled between projects, I realized it. I can’t create a blog that serves up answers, because is there ever really one answer to a question anyway? I can work on finding some answers, sure, but I have far more questions than I know what to do with. And I’d love to explore them with you, and let you form your own opinions, while I'm shaping my own. So that's what I'm going to do. My goal is to make you think, and hopefully look at things a little differently. That is all.