I'm still not entirely sure why I'm doing this.
Writing out my thoughts like this at all feels like a particularly narcissistic thing to do, to say nothing of putting it all online for anyone to read. Plus, it seems to presume that I actually have anything worthwhile to say, which at present seems questionable. That said, I suppose the chances of this ever being read by anyone other than me are slim at best, so what the hell.
If there's one lesson I quite liked from years of computer science it's that when trying something new, the first thing you write is always a way to say 'Hello, world'. So this is that. Hello.
I suppose I have a few reasons for writing here, really. First and foremost, I want to be a better writer. I've always been a particularly technically-minded person, which has served me well in many respects, but it's also meant that my ability to communicate has been defined by functional necessity. I've always admired people whose writing somehow amounts to more than just the sum of the words they can get out, who can express themselves with a degree of clarity and economy and grace beyond the minimum needed to convey a concept to another person – it's just something that's never come naturally to me. I'm not sure it's something I'll ever be great at, but I want to try. All the advice I've ever come across about it says the same thing: if you want to write better, write more. I'm hoping the discipline of writing here will help do that for me.
Beyond that, I also want to document things for myself a little better. Although I've never been the kind of person to keep a diary or journal, I'm at a point in my life where I think I'd like to be able to look back in years to come and make sure I understand what I was thinking and feeling; I think there are some decisions and changes I'll need to make before too long which probably warrant more introspection than I'd ordinarily be likely to give them.
I've spent a lot of my life to date working as a lawyer, in a career that I'm not sure has really contributed much to the world – there's actually a decent argument to be made that more people would be better off today than worse if I'd never gone down this path at all, and had simply found some other line of work, somewhere else. It can feel as though, at its best points, I just help pick up the pieces after some other kind of damage has already wrought havoc on someone's life — but no matter what, the damage has still been done. At its worst, the law doesn't even have that virtue.
What I've realised lately is that what I really want to do with my life is to make stuff. My strongest interests have always been things like performing music and writing software, and even though I haven't had as much time to devote to them as I'd like in recent years, I'm still happiest today when what I'm doing creates something new that didn't exist before. I need to do more of that kind of work, even if, as I suspect, it's mostly going to be not very good. I'm really interested in art and technology and creativity, and although I don't feel as though I really know anything about any of them, I want to change that. I think I've reached a point now where I have to follow that instinct; after years of ignoring it, I'm not sure how many 'next time's I still have left to defer things with. I hope the process will be interesting to write about, and to cringe at years down the track.
And finally, as for why I'm putting what I write on this site, there's something kind of comforting about the potential permanence of it. Not permanent in the sense of anything eternal or everlasting — obviously these words are nothing but electrons zooming around in some indeterminate mass of transistors and wires and cables — but at least it's somewhere separate from me, and outside my own head. I don't think there's much that I've done in my life that's had any kind of lasting influence on anyone or anything, but I figure that if what I write stays here for as long as the Internet will bear it, maybe it stands a chance of doing something useful. Someone might stumble upon it someday, or maybe I'll eventually write something that someone seeks out and finds useful. Or if not, maybe it's just a really cheap kind of therapy. Either way, as of now it'll exist separately from me, which is kind of cool.
Obviously this hasn't been terribly well thought through yet. It's possible it never will be. All I really know for sure right now is that I need to start doing some things differently, because I need to get better at doing better work, and better kinds of work. This site is where the proof will go.
So that's what I'm going to try. Hello, world.