> - I kickstart my day with my own thoughts, not someone else's (i.e. social media).

I like how similar and the same time different our approaches are.

I wrote an app to develop my writing habit (https://enso.sonnet.io). It's a "stream of consciousness" notepad separating writing from editing which makes it harder for you to edit yourself. I've been using it every day for the past 3 years, with ca. 800 words per day and I suck at sticking to habits. Check it out!

My notes are mostly private but I also write longer, researched articles, usually with an outline. As an experiment I wrote https://sonnet.io/posts/sit using Ensō, then spent 1 week rewriting and editing.

> - I have an ever growing vault of things I can point to (I do this a lot)

Have you tried using Obsidian Publish? I use it non stop as a personal knowledge graph and a brain dump. I have a different flow for posting public notes since my site runs on 11ty, but if I didn't care about branding, I'd just use it instead.