I’ve had blogs on the internet in one form or another for well over two decades. My writer’s blog Cryptic Whit turns ten years old this June. Until recently, most of my blog writing had been in the first person, but I got tired of that. I wrote the following when I started this AmokShado blog space:

One idea behind this website is to get away from first person writing. It has become tiring to always be promoting ‘self’, tooting a narcissistic horn (all thru the day I, me, mine…). With reality TV usurping autobiographical fiction as the dominant “I” form, old styles of first person expression seem to be getting totally misconstrued, taken as “ego” writing instead of a kind of personal inventory. Clinging to those old ideas of exploring self through the first person has become a fool’s errand, so it seems best to let it go.

Another idea behind Amokshado was to move toward a media publishing company of some kind. These being such frangible times, there’s no saying how efforts to start a dialogue or make some kind of difference might get one into bad situations. The business of writing with a by-line just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. So this is just a space to get down some ideas. Much ado about nothing really.

I have largely stuck to that idea, and it’s was beneficial to get away from first person. Lately though, it feels like it’s blocking a lot of new writing. So I plan to get a little more personal in this space, using first person again, and maybe that will help to pick up the anemic pace of my writing lately. A sort of resurrection or resuscitation from the shadows.

This AmokShado blog is approaching five years old, and what a dark five years it has been. The pandemic set in and totally disrupted my life. Serves me right I suppose for using the words ‘amok’ and ‘shadow’ in the name. It’s like I knew dark times were coming. Is there any way to take it toward the light now?

Can these frangible times be pieced back together into a life? It feels like a struggle to get back on track, and I’ve got a legal hearing arguing about unemployment money I received during the pandemic. The state of Arizona says I didn’t deserve it and I have to pay it back. Yet I had a worse pandemic financially than almost anyone I know personally. I’m grateful that I never ended up among those living in a tent or panhandling on a street corner, but I’m still digging out of a whole loss of self. So maybe reclaiming the ‘I’ in first person writing is part of piecing back together what’s been lost.