Why I'm Writing

Photo chosen because there's a degree of shamelessness involved any time you share your life online, right?

Hmm. I'm still figuring out what I want from writing in this space. And how what I am interested in writing intersects with what people are interested in reading. There’s something so awkward about trying to get strangers on the Internet interested in your life, isn’t there? (This is an interesting take). It's hard to imagine developing a huge following, and I'm not looking to turn this into a career. I do not plan on being a social media expert or a life coach.

Why am I writing, then?

Most of all, I am writing to push myself as a writer. I want to write more and better. These days, no one is assigning me to keep a weekly journal or to expound on my personal philosophies on life and literature, and I miss writing outside a professional setting. If I push more of my thoughts out of my personal journals and into the world, I'm hoping it will push me to think clearer, to write better, and to connect my own words with what could be valuable to someone else.

I am writing to work towards (if not hit) the 10,000 hour mark of mastery. 

I am writing to document, hopefully with some consistency. I have intermittently kept journals my entire life. I love both the process of emptying thoughts onto paper so I don't have to hold onto them so tight in my head, and having the record of how I saw the world at nine and sixteen and twenty. So I love the idea of having almost ten years of archives documenting your growing into adulthood.

I am writing in hopes that, in the process, I will find my voice, written and otherwise. I think finding your voice is one of the most important things you can do as a young adult. (Beyond growing in compassion and trying to save the world and all of that). 

I am writing because I want to practice condensing my thoughts into their most interesting kernel, omitting the whole lengthy backstory. 

I am blogging because as much as I like the idea of writing New Yorker-worthy essays, I perhaps have no imagination for fiction and no energy to research and write nonfiction, at least at the moment. Bits and pieces of my personal life, on the other hand, are right there for the inscribing. And what could be more interesting, to quote Dave Eggers, than the "many twists and turns of my own thrilling and complex mind"?

I am still trying to work out a cohesive subject matter, if such a thing exists in blogland. I will keep writing about my travels, and I hope that will push me to pay closer attention when I am traveling. I will post the occasional craft, and I hope that will push me to be more creative. But mostly, I plan to keep writing about this process of growing up, and to see where it all takes me.