In 2021, I bought a new keyboard for stenography. It wasn’t until a year later, when I committed to writing a daily diary with it, that I actually started learning steno. At the start of 2022, I set a simple, achievable goal: write 20 words every day.

We’ll come back to how well I kept that habit, but this year I’ve set a new goal: write 500 words each week, and publish it here, my new—hopefully lifelong—blog.

My steno keyboard, a Georgi with MBK Choc keys and a high-tech tenting base.

Why write a blog?

I’ve long believed that writing—in particular, sharing personal thoughts, experiences, stories—profoundly affects people. Sometimes those people are future-you, who, despite being continuous with now-you, can benefit anew from past-you’s reminder. Often, they are strangers who are inspired by your story, and whose lives may be unknowingly forever changed.

It might seem trivial in the moment, but you’ll only realize years (or decades) later how pivotal that moment really was. Others’ blogs have led me down life-long interests I’ve never known about, and helped me make life choices I’ve never known could better my well-being.

Here are the people whose online rambles have been the most influential to me, in rough chronological order:

Why not write a blog?

The scary thing about sharing my life is that my story is inexorably intertwined with the stories of others’, whose privacies may not want to be aired. That’s why in the past I’ve always written either privately, in journals, diaries, apps; or anonymously online in Tumblrs.

Despite this, I’ve always been immensely grateful for those who do write their stories, who boldly share a dimension of their lives, happy or sad, introspective or matter-of-fact, pithy or diffuse, public or private. It reminds me that we’re all connected in this world; we are all living our stories together, whether or not we share them through our words, our feelings, our art, our experiences. People are part of stories, and I don’t want to omit the people who’ve been a part of mine.

In honour of M, who deeply affected me a decade ago and continues to influence me, I will be pseudonymizing people with single letters. Any resemblance to actual names is ‘coincidental’.

Why write a blog?

Teach what you learned, to leave lessons from your past for the future.

Let people who want to stalk you stalk you. I’ve always found it nice to follow someone and see “how they’re doing”, especially if you haven’t caught up in a long time.

Cohere your scattered thoughts and ideas into something thetical.

Practise a skill like language learning or stenography.

They’re autobiographical: snapshots of me in time.

So here goes. Here are my stories.