On Coming Home

There’s so much richness in Mandy Brown’s piece on writing, work, context, and creating a space for oneself.

Brown focuses on the shift from using social platforms for publishing—rigid systems that haven't evolved with users' needs—to building spaces where intentional connections between ideas can form and grow over time. Instead of being focused on content ownership, she’s more interested in context, in placing her thinking "within [their] own body of work."

One of the things that struck me most was Brown’s intention to shape her reading, writing, and other online efforts around a single topic—books:

"I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. … It’s allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given. Not every seed I’ve planted has thrived, of course. But after all these years, some are quite hardy, while others have made some very rich compost. And I find myself often amazed by what emerges: not only the seeds I planted but a great many I never anticipated, connections and stories I didn’t see until I was right on top of them, until they were tangled at my feet."

That kind of foresight and deliberate action to sustain a process over time is something I envy. I've had many ideas on how to focus my creative energy online, but I haven’t stuck with any one thing long enough to turn it into a lasting practice.¹ Maybe Brown's words are a push in that direction. 🤷‍♂️

Another key point is Brown’s reflection on labour and the role of friction in meaningful work:

"And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being."

As much as I value efficiency, I find I’m most efficient with the work I care about least. I try to streamline tasks I don't enjoy so I can make space for things I want to labour over. With work I’m passionate about, the time and mental effort I invest in thinking and creating is often what I enjoy most—the process is more fulfilling than the result.

On the subject of AI doing work for us, Brown adds:

"But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is gone. What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves."

What happens when the work is gone? Does more work appear, or do we fill that time with things worth labouring over? I see the value in AI taking care of less meaningful tasks—as long as we use that time for what really matters.

Lastly, Brown touches on the nostalgia many of us, myself included, feel for an earlier time in the social media landscape. For me, that’s Twitter circa 2007:

"…a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it."

I've been longing for a return to some version of the past I remember for some time. I’ve even gone as far as drafting a manifesto to revive something from that era, hoping to reconnect with people from my past. But maybe nostalgia is holding me back from letting something new emerge.

Ultimately, coming home isn’t about a place for content at all. It’s about finding what home is in the first place—labouring through a process that builds the context and connections to carry us forward.

Another domain?

Domains were once abundant in my life. Every new idea seemed to demand its own domain— a clever online space to embody the thought, regardless of whether it ever went anywhere.

How much money did I waste on these domains for projects that never materialized? I’ll probably never know.

Now, fewer is better. It’s not about reducing my digital footprint, but about recognizing that most ideas won’t turn into something tangible. I’m tired of throwing time and money at digital placeholders that don’t carry real value.

But what does this mean for how I represent myself online, especially when it comes to maintaining a personal blog?

Using my own name and a primary personal domain makes sense— but it’s also a problem. What about the quirky, unpolished, or even misrepresentative posts I’m bound to write? I also don’t want a blog to be a curated portfolio or a professional showcase. I want a space where I can be my full self and share ideas freely with the world. There has to be a middle ground, but I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet.

If these two purposes—personal expression and professional representation—can’t or shouldn’t coexist on the same platform, then what? Another domain?

Washed: Something-Point-Oh

Back in the glory days of blogging—let’s say 2005 to 2007, before Twitter monopolized everyone’s attention—I was a blogger. Dare I say, a prolific blogger.

I had a blog, posting daily.
I kept a blogroll.
I even met up in person with people from that blogroll.

When I traveled across the country, I made it a point to connect with people I only knew through words online. I loved comments, then hated them, and eventually, I loved to hate them. I even made enemies online.

My blog, then titled WASHED (for no particular reason), started with good intentions—at least I like to think so. I was introduced to blogging during my early university years, after a long history of re-publishing other people’s content on one GeoCities page after another. Blogging, particularly on Blogger, felt like the perfect medium to create and share my own content—myself, online.

What I had to eat.
What I was doing.
My half-formed thoughts.

Blogger was my Twitter before Twitter became my Blogger.

Then things went south.

Depression hit hard.
I hated everything around me.
Drunken rants spilled onto the page.
I tried to hide in plain sight—under a pseudonym that everyone who knew me, knew.

WASHED quickly turned into something that needed to go.

I downloaded years of posts.
I printed out my words, images, and all the misspellings, grammar mistakes, and punctuation errors into a single volume for posterity. Then, I shut WASHED down.

...

Since 2007, as Twitter rose and eventually fell (somewhere around 2012-2014), I’ve tried to get back into blogging, but nothing stuck. The perfect platform didn’t help. Topic after topic failed to focus my attention. With my 'public image' now public, at least locally, I couldn’t hide in plain sight anymore. Everything—and I mean everything—I shared online was scrutinized by someone. Someone was always offended, concerned, or just out to get me. I had fans and I had haters. Those were some kind of days.

But blogging never felt the same. Nothing ever clicked. The feeling of the pre-Twitter era couldn’t be recreated.

Now, with whatever limited wisdom I’ve gained over the years, maybe the time is right again. Maybe it’s time to return to the basics—the roots of it all.

...

Blogging for blogging’s sake. Daily thoughts, published without rhyme or reason. An outlet to express my whole self.

This time, without (most of) the depression, without self-deprecating monologues or drunken posts, and without worrying about who’s watching. And with a platform that feels sustainable, controllable, and simple enough. Simply enough.

No promises—neither to myself nor anyone else—about what this might become. Just a stream of consciousness, ready for public consumption. My thoughts, interests, and feelings, out in the world again.

This is WASHED, version something.0.