hello from oberlin, ohio

hello from oberlin, ohio. i come to you live this february from my drafty college apartment, where i sit, tea in hand, preparing to bear my soul to the internet.

i’ve toyed with the idea of blogging for years now. the sheer quantity of thoughts in my mind is striking, and a blog seems like a reasonable storage place for them all.

but of course, i can never make anything easy. like many anxious over-thinkers, my natural tendency is to think of all the reasons not to do something. over the years, i’ve come up with some solid arguments to not start a blog — maintaining a website and constantly churning out content is too much of a commitment; i don’t want to turn into one of those wannabe writers who chronicles their most trivial thoughts on the internet, cluttering cyberspace with aimless ideas; etc. thus, i’ve successfully avoided a blog project until this, my 22nd year.

the nice thing about coming of age in a global pandemic is that you realize that life is short and good things don’t tend to just fall into your lap, so you might as well go ahead and do what excites you while you still can. so here i am. writing.

disclaimer: basically my entire life revolves around writing. in college, i majored in english and politics, and as a sophomore i applied to work at a newspaper — as if my two writing-intensive majors weren’t enough. the difference is, this blog is a space controlled entirely by me. i know it’s cliché, but i’m plagued by the fear of being perceived.

as a journalist, i get to tell other people’s stories. my primary job is to ask people questions and weave the answers together into a cohesive piece. once i’m done constructing a story, i’m accustomed to sending it off to a production team that edits and standardizes my writing to make it reader-friendly before it gets released to the world. taking to the internet and putting my unfiltered thoughts out there is absolutely terrifying.

that said, another unexpected twist of graduating college into a pandemic is becoming comfortable with facing your fears. afraid of change? here’s a world in a state of constant flux and chaos. socially anxious? anybody you talk to might be a vector for disease. the past two years have thrown everything on its head, and this generation of pandemic youth is realizing, probably faster than any generation before, that absolutely nothing will bend to your control. the only thing you have command over is yourself. but i digress.

to be clear, i’m not saying the pandemic has magically disappeared my fears. i just mean that i’ve come to the painful realization that the world of possibilities before me will only narrow if i keep avoiding the things that scare me.

that brings me here, now. my goal for this blog is to curate a space where my thoughts can move freely, without over-editing in an attempt to present myself perfectly to the world.

confession time. i have a journal i’ve kept on and off for years now, saved in a pages document on my computer. it’s 400 pages long. in fact, it’s 400 pages of entirely unfiltered me. the document is called “godforsaken wasteland of thought” — needless to say, it’s quite dramatic. but it’s completely truthful to how i felt in the moments i was writing it. this electronic journal only had one self-imposed rule: i never allowed myself to go back and edit. 2015-era me felt very strongly that any attempt to change any of my writing would corrupt the purity of the emotion i was trying to express. the document is full of errors, run-ons, and altogether far too dramatic language, but it’s the truth.

my idea for this blog is a slightly more palatable, internet-ready presentation of my thoughts. although everything i publish here will undergo editing, it won’t be a product of my burdensome over-analysis.

a last thought: to make this activity more attractive, i’ve decided to think of this not as a blog, but as a collection of letters.

in a sense, everything i write is a letter. an article is a letter to readers, chronicling a certain event; a poem is a letter, pouring your soul out to a stranger or a friend. even an email is a letter — albeit a corrupted one. and these blogs will be letters. letters to you. i don’t know who you are, where you are. maybe you are just me — in a future form. either way,

i hope you enjoy them.