This is my third attempt at writing a blog. Well, the first two versions of this website were supposed to be a “blog”, in that I would collect my thoughts in a semi-public¹ place. The intention was to create a practice of noting down things from everywhere, regardless of how important or useful they were. I would have a space where all my ideas and trails of thought could not just be followed but visualized.

And then one day, I’d wake up and serendipitously find all these connections between my ideas and research and magically end up with perfectly crafted essays with seamless citations². Just by putting in the work.

As you can imagine, these attempts very quickly turned into a space to dump my book notes as I would read, and not much beyond that. Though I can easily see the spaces I am thinking in, I haven’t made much space to do the thinking itself. I’ve never been very good at articulating. Especially as a visual designer and (former?) dancer, my passion has always been for mediums other than words. In fact, writing the CSS for this website was far easier than writing this piece itself.³

When Meg invited me to the Year of The Blog, I was excited at the prospect of giving this idea another shot. I’ve always romanticized the idea of writing. Especially the act of writing in public. But I still have the same struggles as I did five years ago when I began this crazy hyperlinking note-taking experiment: I don’t know how to write, nor do I know what to write about.

1. I say semi-public because although my website has been up for quite a while, Google Analytics tells me a very humbling story about how many people visit this site. But thanks to an attempt to make this website very climate friendly I don’t use Google Analytics any more. Both good for the environment and good for my ego. ↩︎
2. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work according to the Zettlekasten method. ↩︎
3. I spent an unnecessary three hours on this post. ↩︎