The first words I ever published online, outside of private chats, lived on my AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) profile page. AIM was the proto-social media of my (pre-)teenage years. Unfortunately, that page has been deleted from the public internet.
The second words I ever published online came just after highschool, when I made a Wordpress site.
The third set came in the form of software, on my GitHub page, though only the more recent words are human-friendly.
The fourth set were technical discussions published on DEV.to, a software engineering community. These are more human-friendly, but tailored to a rather specific technical audience.
And then we have this site. My most recent attempt to give myself a low-key way of sharing my thoughts.
Thanks for stopping by.
There is an ever-present tension in me that prevents me from writing down my actual thoughts sometimes, even in my private journals. It is not that thing people often say, where I feel like I’m baring my soul or getting naked in front of you. I can deal with that, I’m a closet exhibitionist.
No, the tension I feel is about what happens next. About the thoughts you have while reading mine, about the changes of mind you experience and, in particular, how those changes of mind might cause changes of feeling towards me, your humble author. I write because I want you to experience that change, but I am completely terrified of how you will think of me afterwards, even if I don’t know you.
And so there are some thoughts I simply do not allow out of my head. I wish sharing wasn’t so hard, because I have a truly visceral intuition that trapping thoughts within my head is a sort of killing. If you have a look at my first attempt at a starting a blog (linked above) I used the phrases ‘gathering of souls’ and ‘brainchildren’ to refer to thoughts and writings, and I still regard them similarly to this day; keeping them to myself feels akin to denying them the chance to live.
And yet…
And yet, I don’t want to lose you, whoever you are. There are things I think and believe that I do not think I have the power to say out loud without widening the gap between us.
But I want to try. Perhaps this is a fear born of pessimism, or of insecurity, and will diminish with practice. So here goes. Thanks for reading.