Hi all. It’s Micah. I call myself a writer, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at this space in recent years. So this is my test run putting out a piece of prose and/or a meaningful essay feature.

If you’ve popped in to witness this test, welcome. But understand that this isn’t for you. Not this time. This is for me.

Creating content has been a fraught endeavor for me over the years. I wrote a lot in high school and college. I placed in a few writing contests in high school. I became involved in student publications in college; I wrote comedy, editorials, reviews, features, and more! I thought I could transition into real-world journalism based on my self-evident talents (!) and my extracurricular immersion.

I was mistaken. CNN didn’t want me for their unpaid internship. My application for a dry technical writing job opportunity went unanswered. The lovely folks at a third publication job also ignored me. So I shrugged and went back to the ice cream shop where I had worked part-time during my senior year.

Then I decided to freelance. I wrote for Et Cetera Magazine and Southern Voice in Atlanta, actually getting some real stories into print. But it was a LOT of work for not much money and even less fulfillment. The problem is that I get bored quickly when I’m not the one deciding what the story’s about. I also don’t have the aggressive bent of a reporter. I was much better at scooping ice cream than scooping a story. Transcribing the few banal quotes I was able to squeeze out of my subjects was excruciating. (I imagine I would be better suited today to conduct an interview, thanks to the current technology of voice-to-text.)

Despite having a market for my work, I was mentally exhausted or lazy, take your pick. I had no car, and I was already working a full-time job. I labored in joyless possession of a wandering focus that wasn’t served by the writing assignments I was given. I decided I wasn’t going to freelance anymore. I was going to write on my terms.

What that meant in practice was putting up blog posts in the murky waters of the World Wide Web. The 1990s were about my pursuit of print publication. The 2000s were about forging an online identity and audience, writing about personal things, in a personal way.

It was a trap. Without riveting subject matter, SEO marketing, or any energy to do anything but tap out my little think pieces, what I spent nearly two decades doing was (and still is — this little think piece is Exhibit QQ) an exhibition of diary entries, written by me, for me, and with nary a thought about what anyone else could gain from what I was writing.

I also wasn’t doing it consistently. (See my opening self-deprecatory statement.) I was constantly in the throes of relationship drama, relationship nirvana, jobs, pets, going back to school, a new career which became an old career really fast, anxiety, hypochondria, real estate… and somewhere in my mind I knew that some of the dirt I was kicking up in each corner of my life was meant to be a dusting over my writing dreams, which were far more amorphous and elusive than I could accept. Wiping off the dirt and seeing them for what they were hurt too much, because (and I sometimes “forget” this, although it’s still right there) when I was around eight years old I decided that writing is WHAT I DO. And if WHAT I DO is terrible, or worse, mediocre, then I am doomed.

And the reception to my writing has been–muted. Typically I can’t even get hits from my closest friends. When the people who care about me can’t be bothered to read my work, what chance do I have interesting strangers in it? Just a big, publicly available diary, right? But unlike real diaries, nobody even wants to break in and read mine. Maybe if I put a giant lock on all my blog posts, people would get interested and try to hack them?

So, yes, it hurts.

Last year, reeling at the prospect of the single most inauspicious birthday number I have ever encountered, I rallied myself to renew my commitment to content. Except now in the third decade of the 21st century, I thought, it’s time to pivot. So I went to YouTube. And I decided to focus on music criticism, in the form of reaction videos, a well-worn format that has made mini-celebrities out of some creators. After nine months and over 100 videos, I have failed to make a sizable dent in the platform. My most viewed video was a reaction to “The Battle of New Orleans,” where I was roundly criticized in the comments for daring to dislike war. It got 2,700 views, which to be fair, is way more impressions that any writing I have ever done, but the algorithms and/or the unfavorable reception to my videos has decelerated my viewership to a trickle. A couple of months ago, a Taylor Swift reaction guaranteed several hundred views. My last reaction video was my reaction to 1989, her biggest album ever, and it’s stalled at well under a hundred views. Shortly after that disappointment, I took a hiatus, which I am still on.

So here I am again, back in the blogosphere, hoping to pull something meaningful out of myself. Feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to rake in views, but I must start from a place of honesty, and this is where I am. This is ground zero.

My hope for myself and this site going forward is to document my writings, my creations, my life even. Get everything that’s meaningful to this point up here, catalog it, survey it, and use it as a way forward. Then: start a new journey of creation, of writing, or sitting around talking about stuff that’s important to me (see the link to my YouTube channel for the riveting experience of seeing me sitting around talking about stuff). Get as much of it down as I can, while I can.

But first, we wallow a bit. I hope to be back from my wallow soon.