I’ve always felt that my best pieces of writing were written in times of melancholy, sadness, or anger — generally negative feelings you’d want to avoid.
During the better times, those good but not great times, writing doesn’t come quite as readily. Perhaps it’s because life keeps you satiated with itself, and writing just isn’t needed. For most casual writers, is this not the case?
You ask yourself if having a domain name, specifically edonn.com, actually creates more stress than necessary. Didn’t you just go to bing.com to do a search on “donn lee” realise that it didn’t contain any results linking to your webpage? And didn’t this little thing cause you to start feeling a little flustered, a little stressed, and a little lost? Didn’t you immediately wonder if you should have been promoting your website more to get it higher up the search rankings?
How difficult can it be, you figure, since there is but one more prominent Donn Lee online, that of a Facebook engineer who has been online longer than you have (probably since when the world wide web was born; probably since when you was born). Though his website(s) aren’t very interesting (to you), and they don’t look particularly aesthetically pleasing, his experience affords him the luxury of first place if not for now, then for a long time to come.
Early in this war of “donn” search rankings, you decided that he wasn’t going to be someone you were working to topple (though it had entered your mind more than once), but was instead just going to “be there” hogging the top spot while you lingered in second place; and it wasn’t something you felt or were going to feel bad about because it was exactly what you expected and was, in all honesty, what you were working for.
At the end of that state of fluster upon finding out you were not featuring at all on bing.com’s “donn lee” searches, you suddenly experienced a precious feeling of freedom from no longer being the top dog (or second, or third… were you even a “good” dog?) This disappearing into obscurity seemes to have brought its own kind of reward. The pressure to perform – to write, to publish – had disappeared along with your search rankings, even if this pressure was self-manifested, and even (especially!) when this pressure to “perform” was for a “performance” that really wasn’t anything close to great (…or good; or above-average; or mediocre… deperessing).
It is, you think, perhaps time to give up this domain. Not so much in the physical sense (you love @edonn.com too much to give it up), but what it stands for: “I have my own blog on my own domain, and thefore I am (a writer)”. It is perhaps time to give it up, because according to bing.com, there’s just not so much fantasy to live up to anymore. Your star has faded.
A couple of days back I read a newspaper article in the Straits Times describing the way Liverpool beat Real Madrid 4-0 in the UEFA Champions League. Besides the hugely unexpected scoreline, another thing about that article had caught my eye: the clever way the writer praised the performance of one player while lambasting the performance of another:
Raul Gonzalez barely had a kick. The nearest he got to greatness was shen he shook [Steven] Gerrard’s hand.
Unfortunately the article was not attributed to an author, but I think he (or she), too, deserved praise for this wonderful use of language — it is what I believe a great instance of dry humour.