Hello, world!
Oh look, it's a(nother) blog on the internet.
It feels sort of strange to be writing publicly again after such a long hiatus. Most people reading this post won’t know this, but in college and for a short while after, I maintained a semi-anonymous online blog. This was pre-Instagram, before documenting your life online was so commonplace. I wrote about pretty much everything: school, relationships, religion, work, life as an immigrant, and the occasional short story. I discovered a community of fellow bloggers and made friends, a couple of whom I’m still close with.
I deleted that blog sometime after I entered the workforce to avoid dealing with a somewhat onerous disclosure process that employees of FINRA-regulated companies typically have to go through. I’ve done all my writing in private since then.
So why start again? And why now?
Those are great questions that I agonized over for longer than I’m willing to admit. The truth is that I’ve missed writing, and I’d like to get back to it now that I’m no longer subject to that pre-approval process. I’m also hoping that writing openly and consistently will help me get better at it.
Two pieces of advice I received recently helped tip me over line to hit publish on this post:
There are no new stories, only new storytellers.
Patrick at ELC said this to me a few weeks ago while we were chatting about an upcoming interview for the podcast, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days afterwards. I’ll probably write a longer post about it sometime, but I love this quote so much and found it really grounding in a way. I’d gotten so caught up in my head about whether or not I’d have anything new or interesting or enlightening to say, not just on the podcast itself, but also for this blog as well. And what I concluded after days of ruminating on this thought was that it didn’t matter if I had nothing new to say that people hadn’t already heard before (which is likely going to be the case). What matters is that I’ll be saying it, and I’ll be bringing the confluence of my perspective, experiences, and personality to the stories I’ll be telling.
Prioritize having fun with it.
A writer friend told me this, and I liked this advice because it’s a reminder to not be so serious about things, least of all this blog. I can write about my experiences in tech and what I’m learning at RC, but I can also write about triathlons, New York City summers, Detty December, interesting media I’ve consumed recently, my newfound love for crosswords, getting back into drawing, my efforts to nurture the type of local communities that I’ve always wanted to be part of… I might share some extremely rusty creative writing attempts. I’ll likely talk about my ongoing “year of rest and relaxation” as I’m calling it (no, not like that). Who knows! We’ll see!
Right now, all of this stuff will go into a single RSS feed (which you’re welcome to subscribe to). You can also just check back here once in a while to see what’s new, if that’s more your style.
So that’s it. Hello, world!