Cautious Return

It has been 2 years since I have written on this website. I started to build this back in 2016. It almost hurts to realise that that was 7 years ago.

I'm quite proud of what I did with almost 5 years of writing here. The project that is Thoughts On is huge and vast. I'm indebted to my younger self for taking the time to learn to write here, to study film and grow as a thinker by essentially talking to nobody.

Thoughts On was never successful, and I've never been confident anyone has really read much here - apart from me that is. The blog is more successful now than it was in the times I was actively writing, bringing in more than 10,000 views a month - though that could just be bots crawling the site. Last month was an all-time record month believe it or not. I never marketed the blog outside of my social media accounts or put money into it, and perhaps it shows. All that went into this was my honesty and time. After 5 years, I was burnt out.

I made and built the blog as I was going through university, studying Film of course. As I finished my Masters, I had to begin to admit that I was exhausted, and perhaps that there was not much to pursue with this website. It was time for me to focus on a proper job and start to live my life a little, outside of my head that is. More than that, however, I had to be honest with myself: I didn't love cinema anymore.

In the two years that have passed since writing here, I've learnt a lot about myself. I've not watched many films and I haven't written consistently. I used to watch at least a film a day in the peak of my focus and activity here. While I was in school, the ontology of cinema and its relation to Taoism was of extreme importance to me. But the feelings faded and all began to feel quite pointless. I was struggling to believe in cinema, in its value and utility, and in my perspective of it. I believed cinema to be important, and I just do not know anymore. More acutely than that, I used to believe in my own thinking, and that stopped.

After years of intensely questioning myself and developing thoughts, I felt like I was spinning my wheels. A particular focus of mine was always meaning in movies, and in life as a result. Though I developed a huge framework, it began to present itself as pointless not too long into my thinking. I turned toward Taoism to recover myself with this sensibility, and that was a key means through which I built the framework I eventually did. Taoism allowed me to make sense of the meaningless, to embrace the empty and directionless. It encouraged me to be more quiet and eventually I felt the need to stop writing; to do rather than to think.

I have written to myself, at long last, of the actions I chose to engage above the thinking I abandoned as I left university. I gave up trying to write screenplays and analyse cinema to try live a movie myself. The story has not concluded; it taught me so much about myself. The movie I have lived should probably never be screened publicly.

I rest now in the fact that I am not in love with cinema, still. It is sad and perhaps unfortunate, but I do not believe the relationship will ever be what it was. Writing was in me far before cinema, and it remains. I always wrote for myself, even here and on film - it was all for university and my focus on getting the most value out of my degrees. I have hoped to write for more than this, but am not certain. Writing as a business appeals to me at times, but I shy away from the possibilities also, knowing full-well the heavy impact of writing seriously.

Nonetheless, I return to Thoughts On to find some direction and explore again. I will be finding my feet from here, and hope to attract like-minded individuals to explore the thinking mind-body as it engages the modern world and its media.