Let there be light!
First post!
This blog has been a long time coming. For the longest time now, I’ve felt insecure about a blog I’d maintain. Will my writing look stupid? What’s the most striking design? And moreover, what will I write about? No one has ever called me a writer ever in my life. So, I always shrugged this off as me not just being good enough.
But I’m turning 30 soon (more on that in another post), and after a while I realized that almost everyone has this same anxiety in some aspect. I even learned a name for this anxiety: perfectionism. In my case, it manifests as the feeling that I have to do things right the first time, or else why even bother? Granted, there are times when these thoughts are warranted, but they’re few and far between. There’s a popular story about 2 sets of ceramics students. One class only had one chance to submit a quality pot, while the other class was encouraged to try as often as possible. The latter eventually submitted higher quality pots than the former.
The moral of that story is that for most skills, quantity trumps (infrequent) quality. I’m at this point where I can start barfing out words on command, albeit with lots of preparation. To get better at writing, I feel like I need a space to fail at writing, and fail regularly.
Hence this blog! I will post around once a week to get that practice in, but forgive me if life will get in the way.
I don’t know exactly what the tone of this blog will be. This may be more of a “personal introspection journal”, where I write about some fancy internal musing about my life and the general human condition. Sounds vague? Yeah, I agree.
I certainly don’t want this to be Yet Another Technical Blog. There’s a ton of those already on Hacker News. If I’m ever gonna write anything technical, I want to show the pain and struggle I’ve experienced to get to that technical insight. I feel like many technical posts out there just show the outcome, with an implicit voice of “look at me! I’m so smart to have this insight fully formed”, ignoring the stumbles and detours taken along the way.
So, I hope this wasn’t too rambling. This blog is about getting to write, and I want to start writing.