I'm going through one of those periods when I'm exhausted after work. Tonight it's raining, and besides pulling my laptop out to write this, I've been listening to the rain and laying on the couch.

The hardest part after a period of inactivity is building the energy to get started again. Today when I got home, I thought about some music I made a couple of weeks ago, and how I was going to finish it. I had another idea for writing the first post here too.

Then, something happened that feels almost inevitable. I called a friend for about 30 minutes. I heated up something I cooked last night, and proceeded to watch two hours of Youtube videos about network-attached storage.

There's a false comfort in watching long form video, or reading a lengthy news article about whats happening in the world today. My mind tells me I'm learning something that will affect my future self in a positive way.

That may have been true in my 20s, but as I approach the middle of my 30s, I know it's false. It doesn't matter. I'm no different from the doomscrollers. I'm doing anything I can to not face my thoughts about the future.

For a period of 5 years or so, I genuinely felt like an artist. Like I had earned the right to say it without turning into a crushed paper ball when the words left my mouth. Creating this space for myself is about trying to reclaim that feeling.

A year ago I bought a domain name and started setting up a blog, but then the winter came, and nothing in life was working out, and I didn't have the energy anymore.

The motivation this time is different. The recent passing of a friend. I've thought about him every day. He was an artist too, mainly as a writer.

We used to DJ together in high school at friends parties. Discuss music, movies and books constantly. I valued his opinion on every topic, and his ability to synthesise works from these different disciplines together.

Then I found some of his writing online after he passed, and experienced the raw power of it. His honesty, his understanding of the complexities of being alive today, the fact he put his name to it. He wasn't afraid for someone from his job or his life to see his deepest thoughts - expressed with complete courage and conviction. He inspired me.

I'm beyond the age where I want to curate a version of myself where the words, music, photos and creativity are all in sync and 'make sense' to the audience, if there even is one. All I want is to follow those paths of creativity and express myself, exactly how we were doing when we first got on the internet.

I know these feelings around self expression in the real world and on the internet are coming up for other people too. The solutions tend to get misdiagnosed as digging up the graveyard of nostalgia, or building synthetic versions of community like Mastodon and Discord — platforms that end up inheriting the same problems as the ones they were supposed to replace.

I don't want to be federated or networked. All I want is my own space. That's what this is, and the reasons why it's here.