Why I Started Writing

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.

For the last few years, I’ve had thoughts. Not the throwaway kind — the kind that sit with you at 2am when you should be asleep, the kind that make you want to grab someone by the shoulders and say do you think about this too? But I never wrote them down. Thoughts in your head stay fuzzy. Writing sharpens them.

There’s also the embarrassment problem. Putting ideas in public is uncomfortable because public ideas can be wrong, and being wrong in public feels awful. But I’ve come around to thinking that’s exactly the point. If I can’t defend an idea in writing, I don’t actually hold the idea — I’m just vaguely gesturing at it.

So this site is partly a discipline exercise. If I believe something, I should be able to articulate it clearly enough that a stranger could understand it, push back on it, and tell me where I’ve gone wrong.

It’s also partly a record. I’m 18 now. I’ll be a different person in ten years. I want to be able to look back and see exactly what I thought, how I reasoned, what I got right and spectacularly wrong. The alternative — just living forward without documenting — means the past collapses into vague impressions. I’d rather have something concrete to argue with.

And honestly, some of it is vanity. I like the idea of writing something that’s actually worth reading. Whether I’ve achieved that with this first post is a separate question. But you have to start somewhere.

More to come.