A Blank Page, Part 2

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about how scary a blank page is, and how I struggle to get the big ideas out of my head and onto paper. I had all these plans for journaling and blogging more consistently. I was going to write for me instead of for an audience. I was going to use writing as a tool to empty my mind and think more clearly.

And then I didn’t write anything for seven years.

I wish I could say there was a good reason for that, but there really wasn’t. Life just got busy. The kids got older (four kids will do that to you). We’ve had some big changes as a family. The world went through a pandemic. I went through some career changes. And somewhere in all of that, this blog just quietly sat here waiting for me to come back.

The ironic thing is that I never stopped wanting to write. I’d have a thought or an experience and think “I should write about that,” and then I’d open up a blank page and just… not. The blank page won, over and over again. I think I focused too much on that blank page and how big of a task it was to get some of these ideas out of my head, and I ended up not getting anything out at all. Sound familiar? I literally wrote those words seven years ago about a different context, and here I am living them out.

So what’s different now? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Maybe it’s that enough time has passed that I’ve stopped putting pressure on myself to write something clever or interesting that people will want to read. That was always my problem with blogging; I was too critical of my own writing, and it kept me from posting for very long periods of time. I even called that out in my last post! I knew it was a problem and I still let it happen.

I’m going to try something different this time. I’m not going to set goals for how often I post. I’m not going to make an outline or set a timer or follow any of the productivity advice I gave myself in 2019. I’m just going to write when I feel like writing, about whatever I feel like writing about. Some of it will probably be about technology. Some of it might be about theology — I’ve been studying at St. Athanasius College and it’s changed the way I think about a lot of things. Some of it will probably be terrible. That’s fine.

To mark the occasion, I rebuilt this site from the ground up. The old Hugo blog with its terminal theme served me well, but it felt like someone else’s house. I migrated everything to Astro, designed a new look, and set it all up to deploy through GitHub Pages. It felt good to tear something down and build it back up again. Sometimes you need a fresh coat of paint to convince yourself that it’s worth showing up.

I’m also going to use this site as a bit of a laboratory. AI has become a big part of how I work and think, and I want to experiment with it here — not just writing about AI, but exploring what it looks like to collaborate with it in the open. Some of those experiments might be interesting. Some might fall flat. That’s the point. I’d rather try things and learn from them than sit on the sidelines theorizing.

The blank page is still a little scary. But I think the thing that’s scarier is looking back in another seven years and realizing I never wrote anything down.

What have you been putting off that you know you should just start? Sometimes the hardest part really is just getting the first words out.