To a creative person, there’s nothing more intimidating than a blank piece of paper. Like most creative people out there, I want to be able to express myself in any way I want, with no limitations. But, also like most creative people, I am at my best when I am given boundaries and constraints which I can work within. If an artist tells you they feel the most inspired when staring at a blank canvas, there’s a 95% chance they’re lying to you.
I’ve been wanting to start a personal blog for many years now. I enjoy writing. I’ve been journaling on and off since elementary school. In college, and I’m dating myself a bit here, I had a LiveJournal, which I kept up to date particularly while studying in Germany. Later, during grad school, I attempted to add a blog to my first hand-coded personal site, and succeeded in writing two posts which have since been lost to wherever badly coded websites go when they die.
My most successful blog to date was a book review blog. I designed the site myself, built a theme in WordPress, and launched it in early 2014. I made myself a schedule. I forced myself to write more than a sentence or two about most of the novels I read. I started following the blogs of other book reviewers so that I could have a hope at getting a readership. After a year of reading, writing, and posting, I decided the only part I really enjoyed about it was reading the books. When the hosting and domain name expired, I let the blog disappear without protest.
In the three years I worked for Deque, I wrote a handful of blog posts about accessibility and design. And you know what? Writing those posts was fun. They required research. They helped me to learn new things. Even more, writing the posts helped me to understand the breadth of my existing knowledge. As a person who’s experienced varying degrees of impostor syndrome throughout my professional life, I found that particularly helpful. And I resolved to start writing about things I knew on my own.
That was a couple years ago now. I refreshed this website – and finally got it moved to WordPress – in late 2017. In spring of 2018, I stopped working at Deque, and reclaimed a lot of free time as a result. Now it’s the beginning of 2019, and I am finally writing my first post.
It’s taken me a long time to understand what I want this blog to be. I’m not sure I fully know yet. What I do know is that I like to write, I like to research, and I want to spend more time researching and writing about things I’m interested in. I’m interested in a wide variety of things, so I’m not going to limit myself to any particular topics. I want to aim to write a post every month or so. So far, those are my only goals for this blog.
So here’s to 2019, and here’s to writing.