The Voltage Gate

This question has been on my mind a lot lately.

My life has been turned around completely in the past year after graduation. I wouldn't say that I have changed, but my environment has, drastically. About this time last years is when I lost my ties to the academic community after graduation and I needed to find a job or to set up a cot in my parents' basement. It took a lot longer than I expected, but fortunately I am employed and quite far away from Maryland. In other words, in the past year, my priorities changed. Blogging was one of my top priorities for the first year I was doing it, but in the past year, that impulse has slowly faded.

I've been more or less on hiatus/light blogging for the past six months or so, perhaps more. The medium has changed for me, become less pressing, less impulsive and less relevant to my life and my immediate goals. The question is, is blogging still relevant to my long term goals?

I can pinpoint the exact moment of decline. I was at the AAAS conference last February and sat through a horrible meet and greet with editors from about 20 science magazines where NASW student members, including myself, tried to suck up the best we could to snag an internship or a (gasp) job. The representatives from these publications were the grouchiest SOBs I'd met in a long time, and remember, I spent 12 years in hospitality. I thought to myself, is this really worth it? I'm being told left and right that the industry is failing, that I should just freelance full time and blogging isn't worth the webspace it takes up.

After the conference, I put science journalism on the back burner. I don't think it's ever really what I wanted to do, and my despondence at not finding a job after graduation last May really escalated my feelings of apathy towards blogging. My subject material was far removed, physically speaking. I was no longer working for an environmental science lab or writing a science column or taking trips into the field with an ecology class.

Blogging is a big time sink for a working writer. If I sit down to review a paper and actually research a post, it takes hours of my day that could be spent on creative projects at home that I could potentially profit from someday. Is there tangible profit in science blogging? Not much if you aren't writing about religion every day or using the word "fuck" in every sentence for shock/troll value (and then justifying the use of the word "fuck" in an attempt to dismiss the fact that you don't know how to place emphasis in your writing without using expletives).

But I've never been all that interested in generating traffic in the first place. I started my blog for very selfish reasons, with no real goal in mind except that I wanted a log of all of the papers I've read, the experiences I've had as a writer, editor and supporter of science-based environmentalism. I wanted to remember the things that I read, and to further my ambition to learn as much as can about ecology independently. If people shared my interests, they could comment, agree, disagree, correct me, etc. which only helps me get a better understanding.

So I've been mulling over "why even bother" for the past few weeks now, because even these intangibles seem to be inconsequential.

To be honest, I almost quit entirely about a week ago. Almost.

Like I said, my priorities have changed. Once upon a time I looked at blogging as a second job in a sense, that I was letting people down if I didn't post as frequently as my peers and that my traffic reflected just how right/wrong/successful my posts were in reality. It started limiting me. I want my writing - my personal writing - to always be about expression, not meeting demand and deadlines. That's what originally turned me away from journalism in general I think.

I started blogging to write and learn about nature. I will continue blogging to give myself a reason to be in nature, if that makes any sense.

I've started researching grad schools in the area. I always said I wanted to study science writing at graduate levels, but I think that has changed for me. Writing has always been intuitive for me. Science has not. If I want to continue a life of happiness I need to be in a place where I am constantly being challenged, not leaning on an in-born talent. If I return to school, I think I'll be studying ecology when I do, not writing.

And the thought of being challenged again makes me want to continue blogging, to find that initial spark of interest and drive.

(I didn't realize it, but this has some relevance to the latest Ask a Scienceblogger question: So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research?)