Blog Update: Milestone & Potential Comeback (My First Blog Post in Five Years)

Hi.  It’s been a while.  Just want to give an update.

If you have noticed, other than for the purpose of archiving my Youtube uploads and photos, I have not written a post in this blog since 2021.  Why?  Burnout, I guess.

In 2015, I started to review every single media I watched.  Movies.  TV shows.  Anime.  Everything I watched.  This consisted a majority of what I wrote in this blog for seven years.  Then, at the middle of 2021, I ran out of juice.  I no longer felt like writing anymore.  Not just reviews, but blog posts in general.  Maybe I got overwhelmed as I accumulated for myself a tall pile of “backlogs” at that point – a lot of pending media to watch, on top of a bunch of finished media I was done watching but was unmotivated to begin writing about.

I remember that I received an AdSense payment that year.  Such episodes are few and far between for this small-time blog.  But even the occurrence of monetary gain couldn’t prompt me to continue writing.

In addition, anxieties and frustrations in life had probably affected me more strongly than I would care to admit.  And it’s also worth mentioning that this was during the pandemic era, and everyone just felt drained of energy and motivation during that time.  Considering all these, I just had this unexplainable sense of inner tiredness and lethargy in me back then.  Writing in this blog was supposed to be a way for me to process, be diverted from, or be consoled amid the cares of life.  But suddenly it didn’t yield me such benefit anymore; not only that, it even began to feel burdensome instead.  So, I stopped writing.

Since then, there had been media, pop culture moments, life highlights, important reflections, and world events that got my thoughts firing and got me so close to writing a blog post again.  Spider-Man: No Way Home.  My marriage.  Luka getting traded to my dear Lakers.  Resting more and more in God’s sovereignty.  Shohei and the Dodgers.  All the corruption and chaos going on in Philippine politics and society.  The AI boom.  LOTR’s silver anniversary.  However, I never got around to actually doing it.

Until now.

So, what made me finally break a five-year hiatus?  Well, first of all, I noticed just today that this year, 2026, The Bernel Zone has turned twenty years old (I’m literally writing this within the hour of noticing it); this milestone at least needs to be acknowledged with a blog post.

I made my Blogger account, and wrote my first post in May 2006.  From then on, this blog served as my diary of sorts.  I seldom wrote explicitly about myself and the goings-on in my life.  I wrote mostly of things I was interested in, but these entries contained glimpses of the person I was when I wrote them.  Whenever I revisit them, they evoke in me some of the thoughts, emotions, and circumstances I experienced when I was writing them.  Admittedly, many of those old posts make the present me cringe and want to slap the younger self who wrote them.  But I embrace this awkwardness.  After all, my blog posts form a chronological record of how my values, tastes, interests, worldview, personality, and capacities – not only as a writer, but as a person – evolved or changed over time.  For this very same reason, I rarely edit my posts, even when I noticed grammatical, typographical, and stylistic errors.  These imperfections are part of the journey, and in a sense, reflective of that version of me who wrote them (or this is just a hogwash excuse for my laziness and weak proofreading skills.  Hehe.).

Secondly, I wrote this post, because, well, I just want to start writing more again.  A few months ago, I wrote my wife a poem for her 40^th birthday (posted it in Facebook; maybe I’ll repost it in this site).  That was the first poem I wrote in about a decade.  And I found myself enjoying the process of making it – as if I rediscovered the joy of writing.  That was when I first entertained the thought of blogging again.  Though it took me until the realization of this blog’s 20^th anniversary before I could start a comeback attempt.

And this post is nothing more than a comeback attempt, really.  Emphasis on “attempt.”  By writing this blog post, maybe I could finally gain the momentum I need to write more.  I hope so.  But I can’t really promise that I will now write more often after this.  The demands of life right now have not afforded me the proper headspace and ample opportunities to guarantee frequent writing.

But I will try my best.

After all, this blog may last for another two decades.  And I will need material to look back to.