I got the idea of setting up a blog in a summer late night in 2015. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with it, except for a place to vent. I had a lot of grudges back then. It’s not that I don’t have grudges before - I was hundreds of times more cynical before. It was because I thought I was leaving. I had made up my mind to study psychology in America, and I want to document all of my thoughts while I still can in case I forget.
Setting up a blog isn’t at all hard to me. With some experience with Jekyll while working on another side-project, I decided to host my blog on GitHub Pages, a wonderful gift I just then discovered. I picked a minimalistic theme, threw in a little prose I wrote a while ago and published it. I chose the name- Bastion of Angst- because that was all my blog was for.
When I finally went over the hassles and sat down to start writing, I couldn’t get a single word out. There was nothing but blankness. I guess that’s just me. I’ve never really been the kind of person who opens up easily. In high school, whenever I needed to write about a personal experience in composition, I lied, if not only just exaggerating or fabricating details. I used to prepare all sorts of canned stories for different kind of topic given. I was very good at it, but there was nothing “me” in any of my writing in my whole life. In retrospect, I can’t wrap my head around that decision. Maybe, deep down, I was insecure about my personal story being examined and critiqued.
Maybe it was. The funny thing is I just realized that when writing it down. Maybe that’s where the unsettling anxiety came from. I wouldn’t know and perhaps I never will. However, today, I have determined to change. I have determined to overcome whatever it was that’s been stagnating me and preventing me from speaking from my heart.
I want to write, but I am also afraid of being judged on the quality of my writing. I know what a good writing looks like. I marvel at great narratives and argument. Not being able to write with quality frustrates me. But hey, practice makes perfect, so the best bet on improving my writing would probably be to just write. At the very least, I can think of it as an exercise.
I often have a lot of thoughts going on in my mind. I believe writing them down and laying those thoughts out will ease the pain of my stuffed mind. I hope formulating those thoughts would also help me reflect and contemplate.
To be honest, looking at what I’ve written so far, I sure have a lot of room for improvement. So, here’s my first post. I have declared this be the beginning. I am, and will be, writing solely for myself, and myself only. Here we go.
Write it!