Getting Started
On the struggles with just penning down my thoughts
At first, it was my laptop. That 2017, 13-inch Macbook Pro had been a loyal companion of mine from the te deum of my dissertation, through the numerous half-baked projects to stand-out for potential employers, and finally to the early days of remote work. It had not only served me well, but also given me the sense of arrival - I, too, could seat in the coffee shops and lecture halls and type non-stop. It was a Macbook afterall, and I felt a few more drops of imposter syndrome seep away when I used it.
But it had started to lose its once vivid eyesight with many squiggly lines all over it. I looked for solutions at the store but the ‘Genius’ made it clear that this was the end. This period coincided with the first time I decided to start writing more consistently outside of my Notes app. It took a while to accept the loss of my longtime companion, however, I finally made the call to pick up another machine and forge ahead with my new goals.
Then it was my site. Or sites. As with many folks in tech, I had purchased domains with the intention of writing. And I wrote a little all over the place which naturally became a problem. I didn’t want the boundary lines to cross - imagine a potential recruiter who is supposed to be viewing my latest tech insights being confronted by my attempt at absurdist fiction! The sites also looked a bit dated and had to be retouched to blend in with the look and feel of the current day.
So i set about separating church and state, fact and ficiton, and creating a befitting home for all my works. I grappled with my ego for a while in deciding whether to build the new site from scratch or just pick a ready solution and ended with something in-between (Hugo + Gitlab). Another hurdle scaled, allez!
Then it was the blockbuster story. With all the utensils in place, all that remained was the food for cooking to begin. I thought about all the stories I had imagined and some of my more recent experiences but none was good enough. I vacillated between wanting to bare my soul and abstraction until complete obfuscation with no middle ground. Every idea came up short and every passing day turned a simple, fun task into a tall order. There was, at least, one positive note from this tussle; it showed that I cared deeply about it and wanted to do it right. Motivaion can always be distilled from passion.
Now, we have this. The first note. Not an intriguing story or a profound insight, just a note about making a note. But it is ink on paper, markdown on the web and my voice in the void!