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A brief exchange on micro.blog made me more closely examine why I started writing about mental health here.

After admitting (to myself more than anything) that I had problems I needed an avenue to explore and deal with them. All the professional advice is that it's best to talk but that's still not something I'm necessarily comfortable doing in person.

I was referred to a counselling service by my doctor - which performed an assessment and wanted to begin a course of cognitive behavioural therapy - but, as I've mentioned before, it was only phone based and a bit inflexible. It was also virtually impossible to find somewhere quiet and private at work where I could do it.

My initial post was as much a statement to myself that "you must face this, you must take it seriously" as anything. Not just writing about it but actually dealing with it.

I've written about my #write365 project a number of times but also admitted that approaching things in the wrong way can do more harm than good:

What started as a fun project became deeply introspective and, perhaps, lead me down paths I didn't want, or wasn't ready, to walk. It changed me, maybe even broke me.

I focused too heavily on some bad times and negative emotions; digging up things from the past, that I perhaps and not really considered before, sparked a chain of events that would continue to this day. You might argue that if I hadn't done it I would be a lot better but I feel this was something that was going to come out one way or another - the project just happened to be the catalyst.

It was something that needed to happen, it just took me almost four years to accept it and decide to act.

While my approach now differs to the project, there is one philosophy that connects them: with the #write365 project I wanted to write in public to better hold myself accountable. Now, by discussing my issues on the blog it feels a bit more real, that I am taking it more seriously, that by writing in public I can hold myself to account.

I've been toying with the idea of coming back to the blog for a while but it has always met with some internal resistance.

I think the problem has not been the blogging per se rather everything else that goes with it. But, I miss it and have done for some time.

I feel like I'm in a better place, mentally and emotionally, than I was a year ago and the urge to dip my toes back in the water has been growing.

I miss writing. I miss getting thoughts on the page, exploring language and ideas. It's been a massive part of me for a very long time and it almost feels as though I'm not complete without it.

While I try to maintain that I write just for me there's an inherent contradiction with publishing to the web. The very act of publishing implies an audience which, even in the smallest of ways, can influence what is being written.

I could simply write in a journal (paper or electronic) but, somehow, that feels incomplete having written on the web in one manner or another for so long.

So, I'll be blogging again. This time, however, there will be caveats. Even more than I have imposed previously, but that still doesn't stop me being incredibly nervous about it.

I may have culled my social media accounts over the past few years but (at least for the time being) I don't even want to cross post to micro.blog. That's nothing against Manton, the service or the great community there - I just don't feel it necessary.

I also don't want to get bogged down in the mundane and minutiae surrounding blogging, plugins, coding or any of that. I did that before, got everything working pretty much how I wanted it, and don't need to go that route again. I don't want to get distracted in lieu of actual writing.

This, however, exposes me and what I do. I'll have nothing to hide behind, no excuses. Maybe that's a good thing.

I've always wanted what I do to mean something and spent far too long trying to be something I wasn't. It's time for things to change.

I think I was most natural back in 2014 during the #write365 project, posting to Google+ where the intricacies of platform and technology didn't matter. Yet, the combination of writing every day with what I ended up publishing was draining. What started as a fun project became deeply introspective and, perhaps, lead me down paths I didn't want, or wasn't ready, to walk.

It changed me, maybe even broke me.

So, here I am, still trying to put the last pieces of the jigsaw back together, to see the full picture even though it's different and no longer completely matches the one on the box. Some pieces have been lost, replaced with others that appear to fit but don't match. Others have been turned upside down in an attempt to obscure or forget their part of the whole. Some kind of coping mechanism or self-preservation technique.

So what does this all mean for the blog?

I certainly won't be posting every day and will retain the practice of not (usually) posting on weekends.

I want it to mean something so will try not to post "filler" content just so there's something new.

Just because things will have meaning doesn't preclude them from being short. I will likely post thoughts, ideas, quotes and, maybe, expand on them later. Not everything has to be an essay - that's something I learnt a long time ago.

Things will likely get personal, intensely so at times, and I make no apologies for that.

I will write what needs to be written.

Going over old posts from the #write365 project I noticed a thread running through a number of them: honesty.

• Writing for self gives an honesty of thought and opinion.
• Writing tired, when the guard is down, gives a deeper honesty we might normally try to hide.

It's this honesty that becomes appealing to others, that lets them see the person behind the words.

Although we may have been writing for self it is, ironically, at this point we are truly writing for others.

Adam Procter shared a video detailing what he's working on for his PhD research: reimagining digital tools for design education because they are "fundamentally broken" being a literal translation from paper to screen. He talks about possibly using Spatial Hypertext for the interface (where there are more visual representations for information chunks and their interrelations) rather than linear walls of text pulled straight from textbooks.

This reminded me of an idea I had for a visual social network a few years ago (as part of #write365) inspired by the Ripples feature from Google Plus.

I first wrote about Ripples after their introduction in 2011 as the notion of visually tracking the spread of conversations and ideas via social shares really appealed to me. I envisaged Ripples forming the basis of an analytics offering but, at least until I left Plus, this never materialised - although by 2014 they had added a little of what I imagined such as basic influencer information.

The social web became a lot more visual but this normally refers to the proliferation of images and videos, but what if we could take a more visual, and tactile, approach to text based conversations? Social networks are linear constructs because it is far easier to both design and read if there is form and structure:

post -> comment -> response.

Re-shares may take a particular conversation in a new direction but we are then just dealing with isolated, parallel linear experiences.

Beyond Ripples

I thought, what if this visual format

"could be applied directly to a social network? An interactive social mind map ... What if we were able to instantly visualise the conversation itself rather than just an indication of it's spread?"

We already have collaborative mind mapping software but this is usually small scale, designed for teams. What it we had something similar that was public? It would allow us to:

• follow trains of thought visually rather than flick between discrete threads
• examine multiple conversation threads concurrently
• better cross-reference and create new links and connections between items.

I imagined a visual representation of social data that allowed users to manipulate the layout of conversations to suit their own purposes, align threads, drag items into more convenient places and manually create links between related items - all without affecting the actual data structure. These changes could be shared with others as snapshots (restricted to individuals or groups, or made public) the links becoming "wormholes" between different points in the social graph; rubber bands able to twist and stretch, connecting nodes within this spatial rendering.

The big problem, however, would be whether it was possible or even desirable. Would it be too complicated to present social data in such a manner? Would users be willing to invest in such a system and would it be too difficult to navigate? I also wondered if it would be possible to add this as a layer on top of an existing network (Ripples suggested it could be) or would it need to be a new network, purpose-built, specific.

Thinking about this again after a four year gap, the appeal of such a representation would, no doubt, be limited. Casual users would be unlikely to need or want such a means of examining the social landscape - the simpler the better. It would also not be practical on a mobile phone - a traditional feed would still be required here.

Perhaps such a visualisation could be limited to "chunks" of data, the current conversation's immediate neighbourhood, making it easier to consume and manage but I still feel the amount of use it would get would probably not justify the work involved in creating it.

I've mentioned my Write365 challenge on a number of occasions but not recently, properly (and certainly not here) explained what it was.

In November 2013 I stopped blogging. I was unhappy with what it had become and, as I've said, how it became too focused and gotten away from the idea of what a blog should be.

I wanted to free myself from the perfection that approach demanded and do something different.

The following is a post that originally appeared on Medium. It helps explain the project and the lessons I learnt from completing it.

Lessons learnt from a year of writing

On 4th January 2014 I decided that I was going to write something, anything, every day for a year. What’s more, I was going to do this publicly so as to be held accountable by others and not just myself. This wasn’t a new year’s resolution, just a desire to knuckle down and get on with it.

My opening post came with a warning, a definite caveat, that the next year might be filled with anything: any topic, any format and, almost definitely, a certain amount of rubbish.

Although my target of at least 300 words a day would result in a total word count in excess of 100,000 (firmly in book territory, all typed on my phone) the aim wasn’t to fashion a body of work on any particular topic but to form a habit, to train myself such that writing became almost automatic, second nature.

And so the #write365 project was born over on my Google+ account.

Social blogging.

Over the course of the next 370 days (I had to extend things as illness prevented me from writing for 5 days) it happened: day after day, post after post, turning thoughts into words in a way that I had never done before.

Despite this being a very public project it was only ever considered to be a private exercise, each post written purely for self, purely with the intention of being a step along the path to forming that habit.

But it became so much more.

Lesson One  —  our own inspiration

How many times do we hear the experts tells us to just do it, all you need is to push yourself? How often are we advised to just write every day? Yet we consider these mere platitudes, smokescreens to keep the real tricks to creativity hidden, locked away for the elite few who know the secret handshake.

Like many, I have long aspired to being a writer but have practised procrastination in the name of seeking inspiration, waited for the moment to strike and struggled with the notion of perfection.

It’s true, inspiration can suddenly seize you, fill your head with an idea so crystalline that you don’t have to add anything, don’t have to think about it, just get it down on paper but, sadly, this is the exception rather than the rule.

If anything, a year’s worth of writing taught me that we become our own inspiration. Entering a creative mindset opens us up to ideas and gets the cogs turning, we become an enabler for our own mind and get in a flow.

Lesson Two  —  we can go too far

Once I had settled into a regular pattern, it soon became apparent that I was no longer putting down just words, any words to meet this self imposed target. In fact, it became all too apparent that the project had become a tool for introspection and self therapy; a way to reflect on who I was, what I had truly become and how I had arrived at this point.

Without doubt, it can be good to examine ourselves more objectively to get a handle on who we are but this only works to a point. There is an inherent danger in digging too deep, in peeling back the layers and laying all out to bare.

The experts remind us that, in the modern social web, demonstrating vulnerability is key, showing our humanity and telling our story is vital to the relationship building required to make our online experience a success. Humanity and vulnerability are fine but there are some things which we shouldn’t expose, some stories we, maybe, shouldn’t tell.

Perhaps this is why the cynics question the psychiatric profession: you come out feeling worse than you went in and need another session just to get over the last.

Lesson Three  —  writing is like any other habit

Popular wisdom advises that we can make something a habit if we do it for 21 days. It’s a nice idea but timescales can vary widely for different activities and there are some things we just cannot turn into habits, no matter how we try.

It’s all down to friction.

How much effort does the activity require? Effort is friction. How much desire do we have to do said activity? Lack of desire is friction. What else is placing demands on our time or energy? Demands are friction.

With excessive friction something will either fail to become a habit or is going to to be dropped from our routine, and the interplay between effort, desire and demand can determine our success or failure.

Writing is no different.

After completing the #write365 project I had intended on taking a couple of days break which soon became a couple of weeks, then a month, and more. For all of the effort over the previous year, the habit disappeared far easier than it started.

I was burnt out. I was beaten by friction.

Even this took more than two weeks to complete.

Lesson Four  —  writing changes people

It sounds like an arrogant thing to say in a post about your own work but it is the truth. It changes our opinions and perspectives, it changes our understanding and this can change us as people.

When I doubted what a year of writing had accomplished one friend replied:

"It changed you, it changed me and it changed some others. If the point isn’t to change someone, then what is it? You need to know you made a difference to someone. That shit MATTERS!"

That comment changed me!

That comment made me realise that it was all worth it. I may have been writing for self and been deeply introspective but, in my self absorption, forgot that we can see ourselves in other people’s stories, we can identify with the events they describe, the joy and pain, the memories we cherish and the things we’d rather forget.

Lesson Five  —  we should all write

It doesn’t matter if we are great wordsmiths. It doesn’t matter if we don’t know the difference between adverbs and adjectives. It doesn’t matter about the extent of our vocabulary.

What does matter is that we communicate, that we share, that we express ourselves so that others can understand. What does matter is that we don’t isolate ourselves behind a wall of silence.

Writing is a starting point, a first step on a much longer path.

We should all write.