I’m reading Jacob Geller’s collected book of essays, “How a Game Lives”.

One of the commentary asides within an essay really caught my attention. I’ll quote a relevant excerpt:

my initial impulse is to swerve into the doom and gloom. […] But when writing for an audience of this size, I feel irresponsible just trauma-dumping […] there’s no point in simply telling a million people that I think the world will explode. […] The responsibility of speaking to that many people actually motivates me to write past my own feeling of destruction.

• source: Geller, Jacob. “A Responsibility to Avoid Despair.” How a Game Lives, Lost in Cult, 2025, pp. 124

It resonated with my motivation for keeping this online journal.

Not because this journal has an audience, but because in public (even if anonymous), I feel a responsibility to write down my thoughts as if I was talking to someone else. In my own head, the worst thoughts win. But when I have to share them with other people, there are a number of pressures to think beyond my own self-destruction. Even when I want to kick the shit out of myself, I couldn’t bear the thought of encouraging that in others.

I hope with enough practice, it might shape the way I talk to myself.