For Myself
I wanted this first post to mean something...so I could look back on this a year or two from now or even whenever my mind suddenly reminds me of what I decided to do with my free time after surviving my first finals week. But with all my cards laid out on the table, I have been dreaming of putting this site together for over 4 years already. Of course, every time, I have managed to convince myself not follow through because of time, cost (it's pricey to maintain a site that isn't under someone else's domain), and of course, the little thought that nudges me in the back of my mind telling me that this site could never amount to anything big. It took a while but I did realize that if I'm going to start this off by thinking about content that will satisfy others—I'm already doing this wrong. This doesn't have to get "big", it just has to be for myself.
Besides that, I also want to bring up a very important point for which why I wanted to do this.
I never realized or appreciated the therapeutic effects that writing has until now. Back in middle school, I was constantly exposed to free writing, writing stories and creative projects almost every day but that was a different era. There wasn't any stress about school, work, friends, or the balance between school, work and friends. So the biggest problem that I encountered was choosing if my protagonist in my short story was going to be named Gabriella (yup, I admit I was caught in the High School Musical phase) or Miley (because I was all about 'The Climb'). But don’t get me wrong, back then it was probably a very big deal but like I said—it was a different era.
Nowadays, my problems have to be prioritized and I don’t even get to say that these trivial matters will earn a spot on my to-do list. Typing out all my thoughts is a way for me to declutter a part of my mind so that I won’t have to carry that burden throughout the day. It's probably easier if I make an analogy to the very real situation that is going on in my room right now.
So we all know “the chair” right? For those of you organized clean fanatics who I oooh so envy, "the chair" is the patient one sitting in your room practically buried under a mountain of clothes. "The chair" is the one that comes out of hiding once in a while when you need to shift that mountain of clothes to the bed. Why?—because you need to use that chair. Then when it is time for bed, that same mountain of clothes gets transferred right back to where it started—the chair. To me, all my thoughts, problems and clutter in my mind are the clothes. and this “chair” would be my mind. I've grown accustomed to shifting my problems and thoughts to the corners of my mind so I wouldn’t have to deal with them at that moment. Of course, over time everything piles up until I am left drowning in a room with a mountain of clothes so high that I can't even find the door. But I guess writing for me is a way to organize these thoughts and problems to store them back into the drawers where they belong. So this post and this site itself would be equivalent to me folding that mountain of clothes that is burying that chair. One shirt at a time.