Welcome.
“F*ck it, I’m starting over.”
Welcome to the blog. Here I think about things and publish my thoughts. Begin here to read a little about this journey, and how I ended up scrapping my entire website to start from scratch again.
Starting Notes:
Short introductory piece about the struggles of creating this site, how it came to be, and what I’m intending to do here. Edited and juggled around with it for a while, let’s pray that it retained some semblance of coherence despite my indecisiveness. Welcome.
Welcome.
Alright. This is the first draft of the first post. I had initially started building this blog on a completely different platform last year, with grand visions of what I could create and how I would realise my ideas. It took me multiple months of stagnation to acknowledge that this ‘grand vision’ was keeping me from moving forward. The ‘Ego’ was in the way; all I need right now is to make the bloody thing, get it out there, and write.
Writing was already a habit and no longer difficult for me; right now I’m standing here typing this up, minutes before I have to head out to meet some old friends (yes, during a pandemic. No, we are not in lockdown right now). Writing is something that I simply do now, it’s part of my identity that I’ve crafted and moulded in the last few years of my life.
However, building websites is not quite the same.
The realisation I came to was simple; the ‘Activation Energy’ was far too high for me to actually build the damn blog. Came across this concept through various Not Overthinking episodes, where something requires too much effort to get started, even if its not technically beyond our capabilities; it might just be something unfamiliar, something that isn’t part of our default set of activities. It might be something that requires many decisions, lots of menial tasks, or maybe fiddling with a website builder without knowing how to make what you want.
I should have noticed this months ago, when I deliberated for hours over what images to select, what padding settings made the header look best, which particular hue of ‘off-white’ communicated minimalism and class in one glance. (In full honesty, I’m still doing that even now). The ‘MVP’ - Minimal Viable Product - of this blog is essentially just a website with some writing on it; this isn’t a particularly difficult thing to slap together with today’s tools. Instead, ‘optionality’ was too high, action was too low. I was stuck on something that wasn’t inherently complex, just steps away from being published. And yet this plateau of progress simply made me feel worse and worse over time, losing my initial moment of creation.
——
I needed to set aside the ego, set aside the expectations, and just write. It was that simple. Not ‘easy’, just simple. Record all my thoughts throughout the day, reviewing them every week, and coming up with some form of a post a couple times a month. There is nothing else that truly matters at this point, ‘writing’ and ‘publishing’ are the only real elements of this entire endeavour.
As artists, we often over-complicate, over-analysis, over-stress, and under-execute on our myriad ideas and perfectionist tendencies. This little introductory post is a reminder to myself, and potentially to the reader, that we sometimes need to leave that whole mental cacophony behind. That we must shed this internal burden in pursuit of the most fundamental realisation of our art, whatever that may be.
So I just said ‘f*ck it, I’m starting over’.
This extremely simple site is the result; a pseudo-minimalist mess, slapped together over a couple of warm Saturday nights. Hope you like it, because I sure don’t. And surprisingly, I’m okay with that.
Welcome to my mind.
- JG. 2021
