Dear Readers
Replace the pencil with my computer, and you have my mind state for the past six months...
Fancy being back, isn't it? The last post published on Dear Whoever was almost six months ago. Since then, a lot of things have changed in my life, some for the better and some for the worse. Regardless, this blog was one of the things that had to suffer. Between job searching, starting projects, ending projects, reviving some relationships and ending others, existential crises, and reading obsessively, I somehow lost that fire to write everyday. It's a sad feeling. People ask you about your blog, and you have to come up with some half-assed answer or tell them you've got 'something in the works' (I actually do have something in the works, but that's another post). You try to lift the pen or type a few words, and everything sounds stupid. You wonder why you even started writing the blog in the first place.
Something changed to make me take this hiatus. I can't quite put my finger on what it was, but recently some small part of me said 'Ev, quit grab-assing and just write whatever your feel like'. I'd realized that the problem wasn't that my writing bug had gone, but that I was trying. Dear Whoever started out as a collection of rants about music, sports, sneaker culture, technology, politics, and whatever else I felt necessary. As the site grew, I found myself adhering to too stringent of a formula for posts. It started to get mechanical. After a while I had trouble coming up with content, because the letter format only lends itself to certain kinds of writing. You can't write a letter for everything, especially analytical letters with the intention of entertaining and informing. To borrow the words of one of my best friends, I turned into a professional hater, rather than an honest critic. My writing suffered because it was stifled and overly angry.
So here we are, readers. Dear Whoever is still alive, albeit a few changes. First, I'm going to be writing less letters. The Dear Whoever moniker will stay, but there'll be a lot more articles/essays/whatever-you-wanna-call-ems. Like I said, the letter format was constricting. Secondly, I won't post every day like when I started. The pressure to throw something up can kill your creativity and make my passion of writing seem too much like a job. Why post something if you know it isn't your best work? Why turn something you love into a chore? If it's no fun or uninteresting for me to write, I can only imagine how much it could've sucked to read.
If there's one thing I hope you have or will learn about me through my writing, it's that I'm a person who thrives when he loves what he's doing. I think that's what threw me off my game more than anything: the love was missing. Whether it took a six-month sabbatical, or I had some growing to do before I could love my writing again is a mystery to me. Either way, it feels good to hit that 'Publish' button again. The circumstances that brought me to this point were no coincidence, and I thank God for bringing me back full circle. That said, readers, I pray you'll support Dear Whoever like you did for the past three years. Aside from writing as an outlet, I write for my words to be read. If this is your first time reading, enjoy. If you're a longtime reader, welcome back.