Why I Took Eight Years To Start A Blog

I’ve wanted to start a blog for at least eight years.

That makes it sound like a much bigger deal than it was. I simply wanted a small place on the internet where I could occasionally share a thought.

Still, every time I got close, the idea began to feel strangely… dangerous.

I could imagine publishing a post and regretting some careless sentence. I could imagine someone misunderstanding me, or thinking I wasn’t as smart as they’d originally thought. But the one I kept coming back to was this: I would publish something, almost nobody would read it (or worse), and the silence would confirm that my thoughts were not as interesting as they felt inside my own head.

As long as I never published, I didn’t have to find out.

I could continue thinking of myself as someone who could write. Maybe even someone who could write well. The unwritten version of the blog remained perfect because it had never encountered another person.

That was a comfortable arrangement. It was also beginning to bother me.

I wanted a small place on the internet where I could occasionally put a thought.

Giving My Words a Home

What finally changed wasn’t a sudden burst of courage. It was a website.

I started building this one and got more and more attached to it. I chose the typography, adjusted the spacing, made little interactive components, added sounds, and fussed over details most visitors will probably never notice.

I noticed them, though.

The site began to feel less like a basic website to publish to and more like a room I had made for myself. I could imagine my future writing living here in a way I had never been able to imagine it living in a text editor or a generic blogging site. Like a beautiful shelf you just want to put things on.

That helped.

It may also have been a strangely sophisticated form of procrastination.

Web dev work is satisfying because you can see the progress. A button is wrong, and then it’s right. A transition feels stiff, and now it’s smooth. Writing is less cooperative. You can spend an hour on a paragraph and end up less sure of it than when you started.

For a while, I kept choosing the kind of progress I could see.

Eventually, this started to get a little embarrassing. I had built a house for my words and was still refusing to move any of them in.

As long as I never published, I didn’t have to find out.

I remember looking at the site and realizing I’d run out of design problems to blame for the lack of writing. I could always make it better, but “better” had stopped being necessary. It had become a way to delay the part that could actually disappoint me.

So I’ll publish this.

Almost certainly, nothing dramatic will happen.

And that will probably be useful information.

Keeping the Bar Low

I think I’d assumed that starting a blog meant calling myself a Writer: someone with a coherent philosophy, a dependable supply of ideas, and sentences worth preserving.

That felt like a bit much.

It got easier when I stopped trying to be a Writer.

This website can just be a place where I think in public. Some posts might be substantial. Others might be quick observations I don’t want to lose. I’ll probably repeat myself, turn out to be wrong, or publish something that doesn’t seem nearly as smart six months later. But I’m choosing to be ok with that because I’m just thinking in public.

The More Embarrassing Fear

Failure wasn’t the only thing that scared me.

Success did too.

Put that way, it sounds like I think I’ll become wildly popular. I probably won’t. What scared me was what even a little success might ask of me.

What if people began expecting more?

What if a post traveled further than I intended and strangers started examining every sentence? What if writing started competing with software, design, and the other work I already care about? What if I attracted an audience with one kind of post and then felt trapped into writing the same kind of thing over and over?

I could picture opening the website and no longer feeling alone with it. The room I had built for myself would become a room with people watching through every window, and me inside, feeling required to put on a show.

There was also a sadder possibility: I might enter a world full of serious writers and meet and interact with people who were plainly better than I was.

Not merely more successful. Better.

More precise, more widely read, more naturally articulate. People I’ll feel compelled to interact with, all while feeling deeply anxious while I do.

Failure could bruise my ego. Success might place it under my own continuous observation, as ridiculous as that seems.

Letting Future Me Handle It

I don’t have a complete answer to those fears.

I could tell myself that any amount of success probably won’t happen. But then I’d only be giving myself permission to try because I expected to fail. That still wouldn’t fix the real problem: trying to deal with problems that might never come along before I’d even let myself begin.

The idea that has helped me is much simpler.

By the time those problems show up, I won’t be the same person I am now.

If this site grows, I will have grown with it. I will have published more, made mistakes, learned what kinds of attention I enjoy, and discovered what boundaries I need. I don’t have to be ready for every future problem right this instant.

I already do this in other parts of my life. Plenty of things I barely think about now would have terrified a younger version of me. I didn’t become capable of handling them in advance. I became capable while approaching them.

Maybe writing publicly can work the same way.

That doesn’t mean I’ll handle everything perfectly. It just means I don’t have to treat being unsure now as proof that I shouldn’t keep going.

What I Hope This Leads To

Sometimes I imagine reaching eighty and looking back through this website.

I don’t imagine every post being excellent. That would make the fantasy feel undeniably fake rather than mostly fake. Rather, I imagine finding forgotten opinions, awkward sentences, abandoned interests, but also a handful of pieces I remain genuinely proud of.

Mostly, I imagine being surprised by how much is there.

A thought written tonight might feel tiny. Hundreds or thousands of thoughts, collected over decades, could amount to a record of a life that would otherwise have existed only in my mind.

That feels like enough reason to keep going.

I’m done protecting a flawless imaginary blog that keeps me from having a real, imperfect one.

Now that the real one exists, I get to find out what I’ll put on it.

I wonder what that’ll be.