I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t been very motivated to write lately. Since the new year, mostly. And I’m not sure why. Have I ran out of things to say? Am I in a Funk and just not realizing it? Is anyone even reading these words? If not, is it even worth it to continue?

These are some of the questions that have been drifting through my mind.

I’m starting to wonder if I might be in a sort of Funk. If that’s the case, though, it’s different and more insidious than some of my others. I’m not feeling depressed, although that may be part of the problem. For you see, I’m not feeling much of anything at all.

My outlook right now could be described as “neutral;” not bad, but not especially good, either. Things are just kind of going along, without much effect one way or another. This state of mind can seem good, since you don’t have the black core of despair dragging you into oblivion. But at the same time, there’s nothing to replace that, either. You approach things with a resounding “meh.”

While it is remarkably easy to maintain the status quo in this state, it’s really hard to get ahead or accomplish anything. When I get home from work (having been up since before the sun), I don’t want to do anything except crash in front of my computer or curl up with my book. When I finally get around to writing, it’s generally while my girlfriend is on her way home from her job, as that provides me a regular reminder that “hey, there’s going to be another person around here in a bit. If you have something to do on your own, you should probably do it.”

I’ve thought about putting this blog on hiatus, but I don’t think that’s the right answer. Mostly, I’m afraid that if I stop writing, even if it’s mindless drivel, I’ll never get started again. Then this blog would be just one more skeletal reminder of failed ambition.

And the writing I do here, even if few people read it, isn’t completely useless. It helps me put my thoughts in order, in a way that I too often forget between sessions. Case in point: I didn’t realize I might be in a Funk until I started organizing my thoughts for this entry.

But at the same time, I worry. Couldn’t the same results be achieved by keeping a private journal? By putting my stuff out there, I make it available for other people to read. And because of that, I feel some pressure (likely internalized) to keep my writing “interesting” or “relevant” or “productive.” After all, there are so many ways to spend one’s time on the Internet; if someone is going to spend time reading my writing, I might as well make it interesting.

It doesn’t help that I have a plugin for my blog that tells me how many visitors I get. And for better or worse, those readership numbers have been going down. Because there’s no other context, it’s hard to keep my brain from fabricating worst-case scenarios where I’m screaming in the darkness because anyone who knows about this blog as written me off as some boring, emo whiner.

I’ve drifted wildly off-course from where I started with this entry: I started out wanting to investigate my emotional (or lack thereof) state, and ended up who knows where. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like my hunch about being in a Funk was right.

I think I’ll end this post before I wander even further into morose navel-gazing. Thanks for listening.