I'm Going to Start Writing Again
I have been meaning to write a blog post for an awfully long time, but something has always blocked me. This is the post where I stop making excuses and start.
Excuses, and the real problem
There are many reasons I stopped writing, and I kept finding new excuses not to start again. Lazy. Busy. Afraid that what I write won’t be good enough. Worried that my English isn’t good enough. And the big one: no one will read it, so why write?
The more I thought about it, the more I realised I spend a lot of my day writing anyway: emails, chats, documentation, even programming. Writing isn’t the problem.
The real problem is confidence. I’m not as confident in writing as I am in public speaking. You can ask me to present to hundreds or thousands of people, but writing for people I don’t know, who may not even exist, carries far more pressure. That’s a fear I need to work on.
What I want to write about
I have always wanted to share my thoughts, and there are plenty of things I want to say:
- My reaction to the current pandemic
- How fatherhood is treating me
- The things I like, and the things I hate
- What I learn outside of work and technology
- Maybe even a poem or a letter
A space I own
Over the past few years, most of us (me included) have been living in an era of digital consumerism. We keep consuming content and don’t do anything with it. We don’t discuss it or talk about it. We watch it or read it, full stop. Writing about the pandemic or fatherhood, instead of just scrolling past other people’s takes, is what being on the creating side means for me.
For that, I need a space on the internet that I can say is mine. No ads. No promotions. No walled-garden platform. I own this place: the domain, the content, and the infrastructure that runs it. I have the freedom to publish whatever I think, and I want to be in control of my digital life: the content I consume, the content I share, and the consequences of both.
Owning the infrastructure also means looking after it. My next post is about exactly that: setting up Azure Static Web Apps (Preview) for this site.
Just start
All the tools you need to write and share are already there. You just have to start somewhere. There is a craft to writing honestly, like any other discipline, and all it asks for is time and effort.
That’s the one lesson that keeps coming up in the books I’ve read over the past few years: time is the most valuable asset. Not money, not career success, but time, and the sense that you control it and get to choose where it goes. I want to spend a lot of mine writing, and I’m starting now.