Lights will guide you home.

It was never my intention to leave this blog ignored and neglected for so long. I don't even remember taking a conscious sabbatical from writing. Before I knew it though, I was going through a dry spell, one of the worst I have faced in a long, long time.

It's funny, this whole writer's block thing. For someone who believed that writer's block was just another excuse to not write, to hide comfortably under the pretense of an established condition most writers go through, grappling with it was strange.
Contrary to popular belief, it does not set in whenever there's a dearth of passion. It just does. It creeps up on you, when you least expect it to. You ignore it at first, you pretend you're immune to it. You burst your bubble soon enough. And it just becomes easier to sway, to sway to a tune you don't set, a tune you have no knowledge of. Six months pass and you feel like you are never writing again. You lose the right to call yourself a writer anymore, hence rendering the very term pointless.

But, you want to write. More than anything else. More than you admit. To yourself. By now, you've reached far beyond the point where you could blame it on 'writer's block' and shrug it off. So you wait. You wait for when you think you'll be ready. In truth though, you're only fooling yourself, pretending some more. That mythical, magical day you wait for will never come till I beckon it.

This is home. This is my space. I have come to reclaim it. I created this space for a reason. It was meant as much for catharsis as an almost introspective glance. Without it, I felt like a part of me was just barely hanging in there. Suspended. Perhaps it was an over-dependence. Perhaps it just meant I wasn't committed enough, or that I felt a little like Alice. Either way, it's real. It's happening. I'm reclaiming.

With a frenzy.

If you, dear reader, are the sort of person who objects wholly to any form of personal rants or discourses, I implore you to please stop reading. However, if you are the kind who enjoys revelling in the misery of another, this is the place to be!
The concern that has me up in arms imploring people and ranting is just that. You got that right. I am distraught because I feel this blog has turned into a journal of sorts. Not a diary perhaps (small mercies), but a personal, intimate journal nevertheless.
"Why is this such a bad thing?", you may feel the need to ask when the Internet has close to 80 million blogs which deal with the personal, with the private. That, dear reader, is precisely the point.
In saying that I have sincerely tried to not make this blog sound too blog-gy, I am not wrong. But perhaps it is time to admit that my plans didn't go exactly as they were planned.
A narcississtic journey to the past always gives you the big picture. So that is exactly what I sought refuge in. After reading through a couple of my archive posts, I was stunned, to say the least. Hence, I was spamming the blog world with copyrighted pictures for the past week.
It is not that I have aspersions about my talent or utter lack thereof, it is just that this was one thing I had to avoid. To me, blogging was an extension of myself, but not of me. With that in mind, I proceded to write, but not to record. I procede to opine, but not to judge. Or so I thought.
Even I am getting tired of my obsessive drawl.

What really should be the focus of this entire crusade is how much we have changed as a society. In my last lengthy post, I talked about voyeurism pervading into each section of the society. But voyeurism is not a one-way process. If people get pleasure from being Peepers into others' personal lives, the "others" too want to give a peep into their life. This process basically stems from an inherent need to gain acceptance, to expand yourself and your horizon, and finally, to brag about how much smarter/prettier/taller you are than the average Joe.
The kind of society I live in has influenced me so much that even in my directed and concentrated efforts to not divulge any of those intimate details, I have fallen prey to the same. My only defence remains the unconscious. Sure, blaming the unconscious was a solution, but only for about a nanosecond. After all, the unconscious too is influenced by subversive details.
When McLuhan talked about medium being the message, I feel safe to assume he didn't see blogs as a tangible platform. But he did see what was to be the outcome of this technological revolution. People are no longer private. People are selling themselves, marketing themselves to an anonymous, judgemental world out there. Obviously, given that context, it seems fair to post pictures of yourself in beautiful clothes, to talk about your take on existential reality (please forgive me, I am obsessed) and to post a discourse on structuralist influences in contemporary society. It all seems perfect.
In my entire discussion, I seem to target the very crux of Internet usage and its purposes. Of course, we are marketing ourselves, let us.
It is startling how an entire society, a collective so huge, keeps falling prey to the new. To the experimental. And to the personal. I am one to talk though.
Perhaps that really is the message. Medium has to be the message, and thereby, it is.