this has been a long time coming.

Why now, at what is possibly the end of writing as a form of creative expression as we know it, am I choosing to start writing on the internet?

Interesting question. I have always considered writing to be the highest form of expression of thought and creativity in the arts. I grew up reading Bill Bryson, PG Wodehouse, Richard Feynman, Roald Dahl, great authors who had the talent of making you feel special for having seen the insides of their heads.

My patterns of speech and thought, my choices of subjects of conversation and manner of conducting them, all change following the reading of a good book. Writing has a way of imbuing your personality into your words, and it’s where I first learned how intricately different and cool other human minds can be.

Mine is too. I am a child of the internet, in that I grew up with it as my greatest teacher, one of my best friends, crushes, student and everything in between. I think it’s the greatest invention of humanity, and I spent almost all of my waking time from about 2010 onwards (when we got Wi-Fi, before that it was a little less than almost all) on the internet.

I learned a lot, but I also had to be very much a child of the “real world”, where things like academics, careers, and everything in between happened. Sorta passed me by, while I chilled on reddit, IRC, and the innumerable forums that dotted the early days of the web. I dropped out of college, not being able to reconcile the knowledge I had of the outer world with the staid and traditional methodology of my paper-based city college. (they had students copy (by hand, yes, by hand) instructions from a chalkboard to notebooks as 70-80% of their lecture time(just copying, no discussion. yes, that includes the professor copying the information on the textbook to the board(verbatim))).

This led me to a bit of a long-winded search, into what exactly I wanted to be doing with my life. I knew I wanted to create some kind of art, but my taste was always better than my ability to create, and my fear of putting something out there that did not represent me truly and fully was higher than my want and need to be seen and understood. At the same time, I was of a scientific and rational bent of mind, and could not reconcile myself to committing myself to something without having explored it thoroughly.

My strength, according to anyone who knows me, and myself too, is not in my particular expertise in any one discipline (for I have very little), but my surprising depth of knowledge across a broad variety of subjects, and my ability to link between them and hyperlink concepts across contexts, in an odd mish-mash of somewhat disjointed thoughts. This isn’t easy to describe.

So why now? I am not very comfortable with putting myself out there. Being seen. The internet is also the world’s largest network, and somewhere amongst the people that will eventually read this, will know what to do with it. Is that a bit haughty? Maybe. Am i very scared of putting my words out there, where they don’t exist in a polished nebulous state of awesomeness as they do in my mind, bit where they can be measured and assigned a value? Yes, I am. But fuck it. How else will I get better?

Until, then this is merely my first post, because i can’t get to post 100, without post 1. In embracing what @visakan’s general vibe, I’m just going to embrace the initial suck and get my first 50000 words out of the way. Let it be ugly. Make it be ugly. What is this blog going to be about? I don’t know yet.

Mostly, it is about me figuring out how I can give back to humanity, repay it for everything it has done to me and for me, and see how I can do that while doing right by me too.

I got here through a very long-winded journey, and I will find where I’m going through something just as long-winded I guess. So see you, and be seeing you!