I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I should, and this has thrown my mind into turmoil.
I don’t really want to write about tech anymore; I’ll leave the reason for this vague. However, I still want to write. This is the first post I’ve written in months, and I’ve almost forgotten how to put words onto the page. Which is a shame.
The mind is a massive web of chaotic thoughts and urges all competing to be the one that’s brought to the forefront. At least, that’s my mind. There needs to be order to that chaos. In the past, writing is how I’ve disciplined that chaos and transmuted it into useful logic. Those thoughts bouncing around in my head are ephemeral and intangible. They’ll disappear tomorrow and I’ll never see them again. Even so, they’re overwhelming. That’s where the written word comes in. When I write, I get to pick one of those specific thoughts and make them permanent. Make them real. It isolates the order from the chaos.
My fictional writings are a decent snapshot of my mental state, I feel. I wrote SCP-3733 in 2018. Going back to it, that SCP was quite obviously written by a high schooler who had trouble connecting with his peers. SCP-4785 was written when I was encountering the profound isolation of the modern workplace for the first time. Even Footage Recovered from a Private Server indicates a deep-seated fear of demons from the past coming back to haunt me. These aren’t the primary intents of the work. Still, we all put a little piece of ourselves into whatever we write.
Since 2023, I’ve pivoted to mostly writing about software. In the same way, I feel as though this represents a change in my underlying psyche. Software went from being one part of my personality to being all of it. I went all in on software. To be clear, I like software! I enjoy writing code, and I will probably write code until the day I stop kicking. But I like it too much. When I come home, I need something else to talk about.
Creative writing has always been one of my passions. I always loved building little worlds in my head and imaging all the people and places. Even if they’re ordinary, I’ve enjoyed playing demiurge. Unfortunately, this has become an unused muscle over the past few years.
Writing is a weird process; it’s different for every person. My problem has always been starting. It’s difficult to put the first few words down on the page, but once those words are concrete, the tap starts flowing and sentences come rushing out of me like a bottle uncorked.
My new plan for this blog is to use it as a bottle uncorker. I want to try writing as often as I can. This won’t be every day; there are days when I wake up, and my planner is so packed wall-to-wall that I immediately get home and collapse into my bed. It would be unfair to expect myself to write on those days. But when I have a half hour of time, I plan to use it to get my creative juices flowing.
What will I write about here? Something, anything. Maybe recent events, although I would like to avoid this becoming a political blog of any kind. Maybe introspecting on the things that I’ve done and how I feel. Maybe some weird new information that I’ve learned and would like to share with the world. I don’t have any hard rules. I just want to capture my thoughts.
If you don’t mind me slipping back into the engineering mindset for a moment, I imagine this strategy will bring with it many Pareto Efficiencies. For one, it should let me capture much more of my thoughts. I haven’t really published anything that truly captures my mental state since college, and hopefully this initiative will act as a comprehensive record of what my emotional state is on any given day. In addition to capturing my thoughts, it has the advantage of acting as a record of whatever I was thinking on a given day. Cory Doctorow describes this as the “Memex Method”. Having a lexicon like this may serve as a powerful source of inspiration, perhaps.
I’ve been using the word “I” too much in this post, while disregarding you, the humble reader. I understand that you probably follow this blog for my previous posts about tech. I also understand if this new direction is not something that you would be interested in. In which case, I would not blame you for unfollowing.
But if you’d endeavor to bear with me, I promise this: I’ll at least be interesting sometimes.