Amrit Chima
When I began this journey one year ago, I thought that by documenting my adventures in Hungary I would amass a modest, yet respectable following, that I would slowly gain a little recognition as a writer while finishing up my novel. Yet a few weeks ago I read an article about the futility of blogging for such purposes. With blogs nearing close to infinite in number, the odds of mine catching the eye of even a portion of the seven billion people on the planet is infinitesimally small. One million page hits is peanuts—and I’m lucky for the average of five Facebook likes I receive per posting.
I’m not at all surprised. The intricacies of self-marketing have always escaped me. All this tweeting and Facebooking is too overwhelming. It’s a furious, high-speed race to be noticed amongst all those billions. Maintaining these social media outlets requires a concentrated and constant focus that rubs against the grain of my personality. I don’t walk around with a smart phone taped to my arm to better plug the highlights of my day. How can I truly experience something if I’m always thinking about how to share it with the masses? It’s too distracting. I need time to reflect. Once a month is about all the status messages and tweeting I can manage, no matter my intention to be more diligent. Consequently, I’m pretty much invisible to the world. It’s been a struggle this past year to understand why I write, for whom, and where I fit in the modern writing world as a whole. I still don’t really know.
Nonetheless, this blog has been valuable in ways I could not have foreseen. Taking stock once a month has been a constant reminder of how lucky I am, of how much I have grown, and of what I want for my future. A friend recently showed me how to create word clouds, a jumbled picture of text arranged haphazardly, the most-often used words displayed in the largest font. So I decided to go back and piece together every blog entry I have written since last March for one final reflection on the year as a whole.
February—the end, but just of the blog
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Kodály Körönd near our apartment, a central intersection along Andrássy út marked by four architecturally stunning apartment buildings
Having your work so artistically and concisely displayed is cool, at least to a nerdy writer, but all the feeling is missing. The cloud is exactly what any reader would imagine—much about Hungary and Daniel—but contains nothing of the wistfulness I felt while rereading my posts. Strangely, nostalgia was strongest for my jetlag, which was so severe it persisted for months. Although the lethargy was horrible, it also marked an exciting beginning, an excuse to surrender and sleep, to wake up at 2 in the afternoon and step outside into an entirely foreign world and explore with abandon. Last March I wrote about the insanity of the constant transitions in my life, that I had had enough and that it was time to curb that lifestyle. I now know that I was lying. Those first days and months of a new journey are irresistible. It’s why at least once a year I move. It’s why I’ve never been able to comprehend the concept of settling down.
The itch to travel and start again is returning. Daniel and I have entered that inevitable phase of routine that follows all adventures, and there’s little of my personal life in Budapest left to write about. We’ve been considering a move into a bigger apartment, maybe a trip to Italy, perhaps head back to New York for a visit. And until then, while we ride this wave of the everyday, there is still much to achieve: continue with dance, Hungarian, and meditation, write that short story I’ve got tucked away in my head, and finish my novel that I’ve had to again dig into. Maybe I’ll also try to sort out this aversion I have to Facebook and Twitter. I can’t deny that it would be nice to be noticed by billions, to actually have a writing career in which I’ve got a number of books on shelves not just in the US, but around the world. So that’s on the agenda, too—a renewed investment in getting published. And that’s something else I’ve learned about myself while writing this blog. I seek change because the status quo is so profoundly unsatisfying. I can always be better.
An abridgment of my first year in Hungary
