How Your Past Self Can Help You Right Now

When I find myself in a funk, I revisit my writing. I write a ton and know that at some point, my past self was feeling better than my present self.

I logged into the Google Drive associated with my amy@amymantis.com email. It used to be my band’s hub, but since I no longer have a band, I repurposed it. But the stuff in the Drive remained.

In 2021, I decided to reboot my blog. Only this time, it was on my band’s website. So it wasn’t going to be strictly a personal blog by definition.

I thought about why I wanted to blog again, and I'm impressed with what my 30-year-old self came up with:

Why do I want to blog in the first place?

I want to blog because writing is a way of processing for me and also a way of connecting with my own thoughts and feelings and ideas as well as with others and their thoughts and feelings and ideas. Writing helps me clarify my ideas and what’s going on in my world, both the interior and exterior aspects of it.

As a songwriter, as an artist, I spend a lot of time in my own world, and as an extrovert I spend a lot of time in the world we live in which I think is an important balance. I would go mad if I lived only in my internal landscape despite drawing on so much of it for my songs. I need to be out in the streets as Bruce Springsteen so eloquently sang. It’s that back and forth that has sculpted how I approach my own musings.

I see blogging as an extension of my songwriting. I see it as a way to express and elaborate on more than what I contain in the songs we pen. Plus I like doing it. I also fantasize about what if my favorite artists and songwriters blogged. I would eat it up. But since they don’t, I can’t.

But I can blog, and maybe someday someone will be glad that one of their favorite artists chose to maintain a blog.

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All of that still holds true now.

I really do like writing like this. It’s very fun and refreshing for me.

I’m still working on what I want this particular blog to be, but for now, it’s going to be consistent, though maybe disjointed.