Remember that time when I used to write on this blog a lot? Yeah, me neither.

I stopped writing when I got into grad school; I usually give the reason as being way, way too busy. And that’s true. In the first semester alone, I gave myself shingles and a TMJ inflammation.

And grad school just got even busier from there. So that was a pretty good excuse, and probably 90 percent accurate (did you hear about how you can now write ‘%’ instead of ‘percent?’). But the other 10 percent was a mix of the nerves of a new stage of life (which always makes me second-guess blogging and my voice and the tone I’m putting out into the world) and the scratchy fear of “Is this dumb?”

In journalism grad school, I was surrounded by incredibly smart, sharp and cool people who were writing about deeply nuanced, impactful subjects. I didn’t want to be the dummy in a group of smarties, I wanted to be queen of the smarties.

So this blog (Omg, I’m so sorry) felt a little bit dumb.

A few weeks ago when I tried to start writing again, I decided that I was going to move in a smarter, purposeful direction. I guess, for me, that meant that I spent a few hours reading and writing about the artificial intelligence technology behind Alexa. It started out as me trying to Her myself, but ended up so dry and boring that I ended up canning it.

I’ve realized, throughout grad school and as I looked for jobs and now that I’m about to move into the next phase, that I like being dumb. I don’t want to be smart trying to dumb things down. I like being a dumb trying to get smart. Or even just sometimes be a dumb being dumb.

This blog didn’t start out as trying to accomplish anything. It was just for me to write, and express my feelings and the thoughts I was having as a young person in America who was dumb and fun and smart and cool. Any evolution that happened occurred naturally, like a stream eroding a rock to reveal a really gorgeous pebble. It didn’t happen because I sat down and was like, “I’m going to be the voice of a generation.” It just happened, you guys. (Kidding).

I like writing and talking and thinking, and I want to do more of that. I want to be more of that. So I’m going to try. I don’t know what it’ll look like or sound like, but I know that I want to at least give it a chance.