New Beginnings (Again).

Taking a first step can seem daunting…

Write here…

The idea of starting something has become increasingly daunting and challenging as I get older. The aversion to novicehood; the calculation of benefit to invested time becomes increasingly suffocating and the importance of productivity and optimization has ultimately built in my mind this wall of inertia.

Continue to do the things you know and are accustomed to. Avoid everything different, challenging, out of the norm.

I used to blog weekly at my old website but the fear of starting up again, the countless excuses I formulated to explain my absence and the justifications for why it wasn’t as simple as just starting up again kept replaying through my mind.

I’ve been busy.

There was a global pandemic.

I work in a hospital and therefore have other things to worry about.

All valid reasons and by no means do I disregard or overlook their importance and substantiated claim to my attention and energy…but if I am being truthful to myself, they were not always my real aversion to restarting.

Lazy.

If we’re being honest, and one of my goals for starting a blog again is to ‘be authentic’, I’ve just been lazy. Because for me, lazy is comfortable. Lazy avoids pushing boundaries. Lazy lets me stay the same. [Side note - I’ve found that blogging forces me to be introspective on a regular basis and connect thoughts that otherwise remain separate and sparse. Typing it all out and reflecting on it openly ties together themes, patterns, and keeps me accountable — hence the need to be authentic to accurately allow for meaningful connection and pattern identification].

So here I am forcing myself to write. Forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other. No format. No plan. No real important or self-identified important thing that needs to be shared with the world. Just a selfish desire to start somewhere, just enough willpower to force it out before I second-guess myself, and the wisdom to ignore my inner monologue about the hundreds of reasons this pointless post doesn’t need to exist. I’m an imposter. I’m not a writer. What gives me the right or audacity to speak my mind or think my thoughts are worth sharing?

Nothing.

Nothing I say is important. I am just sharing my thoughts in my little corner of the internet. I come back to this idea way too often, but to some degree, it is also liberating to realize my opinions and ideas aren’t valuable. I think of it akin to pre-teen and teenage tiktokkers who post themselves lipsyncing, dancing, making random videos on the internet. They aren’t always funny, their acting isn’t great, they scream of desperation, seeking the approval of their peer groups and yet I find myself jealous of their free-to-be-silly childlike consistency. It’s like when you look back at old photos of yourself, your hairstyle, your fashion sense and somehow you cringe nostalgically at the bittersweet existence that is your childhood. It holds a special place in your heart that under no circumstances are you willing to share with the world openly and dread openly with moans and groans when your parents share it on full display proudly to family friends.

So Just Start.

I don’t know exactly what the theme of this website, blog or space will be. It makes me nervous to share my thoughts as a now early 30 year old man. Heck, I still feel nervous, inexperienced, fumbling my way through my own thoughts and website building. I’ve got a few things under my belt now like a job, a home, a wife, and I make reasonable life decision (I think) but I don’t want to regret not trying to carve out space on the internet for me — to tell my own narrative rather than have it be told by others or not told at all.

I can already feel the existential identity and legacy crisis swelling within me. But we’ll get into that another time.

Anywho…

Welcome to my blog. Thanks for reading. If this resonates with you, I challenge you to do something you’re uncomfortable with too. Fast forward a couple weeks/months/years and maybe this will become the best decision to (re)start again too!

I’ll definitely clean up the format, add more consistent structure to my writing and build on better blogging practices to engage the audience, pace my writing better, format my blocks of text better and so forth, but for now…

Something imperfect is better than something perfect but not published.