This page has been online for over a year, yet this is the first time I publish an article. They say the first line is the hardest, but this is far from the first. I have been writing consistently since June 12th 2022 at 19:09, but my intended reader has always been my future self only, as I will explain below. In this text I will try to lay out why I started writing and why you might want to do it as well.
Why I felt the need
There are many reasons why I continued writing, but one in particular made me start, and that is recording my thoughts and feelings, to leave something for my future self to look back at. For the most part I have always been the kind of person that avoids capturing moments for the purpose of documenting one’s own life. Maybe because I hate the modern culture of compulsively doing so, or maybe it was just insecurity. Either way, I once had a conversation with my dad that made me think. He told me that he had almost no memory of what came before the ‘76 earthquake. Now, he was a child back then, and it was a defining moment for him, much like covid-19 has been for my generation. Still though, it made me think about what will remain of these years, what my future self will remember of me. My first idea was to take a daily picture and then create those slideshows that are common online. But that was too superficial, I wanted to record how I felt, my opinions and beliefs, what troubled me or made me happy. All things that would eventually fade or become distorted with time. Writing is perfect for this purpose, and so I chose it, though it took a few months for the first line to come.
Secondary benefits
As I said, that was the reason that made me start, but I wasn’t new to the idea of journaling. There are many other benefits to it. One of them is that it frees your mind when something has been troubling you for some time, while also giving you a different perspective on the matter. Indeed, externalizing thoughts into text forces you to give them structure and something that seemed huge in your mind might become trivial on paper. Another benefit is getting better at expressing yourself and writing, maybe even in a foreign language like I’m doing here. I started writing in Italian, then for a period alternated, but now I almost exclusively write in English.
Going Public
I have always wanted to start a blog like this, way before this page went online, but I never saw any benefits in making my writings public. On the opposite, publicity has many drawbacks. It limits the scope of what I can talk about and makes the “What will others think?” question arise. On the other hand, writing for myself lets me be completely honest on any topic, even those that I wouldn’t dare to mention to a living soul. Giving up on these would defy the whole reason for which I started this in the first place, so it’s not an option. Even so, writing for an audience (or pretending there is one) forces me to make my writings more concise and structured like this one, which is something I want to get better at. That is why I would ideally keep both, though time is scarce.
Conclusion
Reading at my past writings, I cannot state enough how proud I am of my past self for starting. The encrypted folder where I store all of it counts 40k words as of now, and it might be the most precious thing I own.