For some reason, in the age of TikTok and vlogging, I want to write a blog.

I guess now that I’ve shared some of my writing, I should probably talk about why I’m bothering in the first place.

As I start on this strange experiment, I ask myself why I begin at all. Why do I write a blog and not just a journal? I haven’t had a desire to maintain a diary since middle school and even back then, I was an intermittent writer at best, a forgetful writer in reality. Which makes the question a fair one. The answer?

Well…IDK.

Even that’s not entirely true. But a world wishes for simple answers. A single bite with all the nuances observed. Sum up your point of view in under 300 hundred characters or a video no longer than a minute. Capture your sentiment in a single quote, give me your elevator pitch. And I do understand why, in a busy world filled with billions, we shrink ourselves down into distinct genres. Otherwise, we may be deemed too complicated, too time-consuming. Which leads me to the short answer of: I don’t know why I am writing a blog.

However, the short answer is not the true one.

The truth is an amalgamation. I think of Bob Ross, layering paint to create a scene out of shapes. A single color does not make a picture. It’s like asking a writer why they want to be a writer.

Because my heart overflows and my head is occupied by too many voices and so I turn the tap and release them in a slow, steady stream to fill the cup of someone else.

I’m a novelist. I love to write long form. Please don’t ask me to write a book under 50,000 words because I will fail. I am not concise. I wish I was. But I am a creature built out of the mistakes that I’ve made and still trying to stumble my way into an answer.

Does that answer the question? Not at all, not really. Which, I suppose, is part of the problem.

We ask ourselves why we choose our careers, our spouses, the route to a coffee shop, and all of those choices have consequences, though the choices themselves don’t always have clear cause. Because the consequences stack and stack and stack and lead us to new choices.

I think about how I ended up working in Quality Assurance in IT. I went to college as a Public Relations major, a choice I quickly fled. Ended up in Computer Information Systems, thinking I would develop strings of code and make sense of how the digital world worked. Learned I hated doing that. Trained to be a business analyst instead, getting hired to do just that, only to fall into the world of IT testing and being fascinated by solving its puzzles.

Does that answer the question? No, I’m dancing around the answer. I know, I know.

I am writing a blog because these thoughts were already in my head. I search this world, particularly in this age of a pandemic, looking for reason, looking for sense, looking for the how-to guide for life (I have the time to read it now!). But the how-to guide does not exist. Instead, all there is to look to is my own stumbling, unraveling the chaos in my head to form it into a single string. Or perhaps one wrapped in a pattern, like the finger crochet I learned in middle school. Knotted and complicated.

This is me attempting to untangle. And why do I share it at all? The same reason I write novels:

to make you feel unalone.

Maybe you will find something in these words that captures the chaos in your skull or the aching in your chest. I don’t know. Or maybe this is just to make me feel unalone, like I can make this chaos mean something. I don’t know.

But I am here. And I want to be here. And I want to keep writing. And if you want to keep reading,

I am here.

Or maybe I am writing for no one at all. Maybe no one will find this page and I will be sending out my voice into the ether. That’s okay too. Because at the end of the day, I have too many thoughts in my head pounding against the inside of my skull and my heart is screaming and some days, I too am screaming because there’s too much too much too much. And writing makes me

quiet.