Introduction

This—a first post on a new blog—is scary and vulnerable for me. Scarier than packing up my life of the last ten years and moving to a city where no one knows my name.

I haven’t been compelled to be this candid in my writing in a public capacity since I first started blogging in the naivety of my early 20s, just having moved to Boston, and having no reservations about perception, professional reputation. It was for me. It was for fun. It was the open letter to anyone who wanted a window of what was going on in my life. It was more scalable than writing letters to the 20+ people with whom I was corresponding at the time while trying to hold down a full-time job.

In some regards, the purpose of the blog hasn’t changed, whether it was here or on Medium. It is still the open letter for anyone who wants a window of what is going on in my life. But there’s a greater intention and focus to it now than there was a decade ago. The truth is I want to find a way to parlay this into a career.

The more I write it down on paper, the more I say it out loud, the more the fear creeps in:

I want to be a bestselling author.

I want to make a career as a writer.

I want to not have to work in tech anymore unless I choose to.

I want to be more than some mediocre, striving middle manager at some uninspiring company.

I want to be in the driver’s seat of my own life instead of a mere passenger along for the ride.

I want to live an extraordinary life.

I want to have a story worth telling.

Because I’m taking my writing more seriously now, I am combating the tendency of wanting everything I create to be brilliant, artistic, special. Blogging regularly will mean having a lot of rougher work enter the digital atmosphere. But that’s part of the fight I have to fight, too—reckoning, accepting, embracing imperfection. Right now, I’m striving for a few posts here a week as an open journal of everything I’m contemplating on the road. They don’t need to be good. They do need to happen.

I have to remind myself constantly that I need to generate a lot of lumps of coal in order to get to diamonds, need to eat a lot of sand to push out pearls. Raw materials plus pressure equals the gems. I have no problem with generating pressure on myself or finding others to put pressure on me to get to the gem state. It is also worth noting that when I see coal, others see an uncut diamond. I’m hard on myself and don’t always see myself with the utmost clarity. Perspective prevails here.

Perspective prevails again in the effort to write something “interesting” on this blog. I have to remember that most people I talk to haven’t lived or worked anywhere else for any meaningful stint of time—or at least haven’t done so in a long time. In many cases, reading this blog is an opportunity for them to live vicariously through me. My contemporaries are either COVID-cautious, having kids, paying down a house, running a business, or otherwise staying put in their current geography, career, community, etc. Whatever the reason you’re here, I hope you enjoy what I have to say.