Chapter 1: New Beginnings

There really isn’t a chapter on this, this is just a blog post. I just felt like being dramatic. I started this website for the sole reason being that I wanted a parking lot where I could put all of my writing. I figured that this is also the most convenient way of sharing it with the world. My biggest fear for this website is that people will think it’s a blog. I don’t want to have a blog, way too many people already have one already. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that people have them, but I just don’t see the value of adding my personal story or “journey” or whatever you want to call it into the black hole that is the internet. I’ll place my writing into that void instead, thank you very much.

I don’t know when I really started to actively write. What once was a trickle is now a flood. It began by journaling as a form of mindfulness and to unpack my emotions. I then started to write poems. These poems are often infrequent and few and far between. For me, they are way to release any strong emotions I’m feeling. When the fires were (still) raging throughout the Amazon, just adding to this idea I already have that our world is on fire, I felt such anger and rage at the situation. I wanted to scream out to the world (and especially to the governments of the world) “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Can’t you see the world is literally burning right before our eyes? Do something!” I wrote my poem “At Least You Have Your Dollar” as a way to vent my frustrations. (Side note: That poem will be published in Eber & Wein’s Best Poets of 2019). You get the idea.

My writing really took off, however, when I was studying abroad in Australia. Travelling is something that has always been really important to me, it really just makes me feel alive. I started writing my travel essays for that reason. It allowed me to document times in my life that I felt the happiest. When I read and write these essays, I’m flooded with the memories of these experiences; memories and details I fear would fade from my memory otherwise. These essays were also the foundation of my writing skills. I was never really a great writer in high school or my first two years of college. But as I wrote these essays, I could literally look back and see how much my writing had improved. I don’t plan on giving up travelling anytime soon, and with every trip I take, there will be an essay to accompany it. Read them if you like, or not. I think they can be boring sometimes, but I also think there are a lot of cool stories in there as well. Like the time my fragile toxic masculinity led me to losing half of my toe in an Australian National Park, or the time I thought I was going to be murdered in Savannah in a night that included cats, karaoke, and heartbreak.

And finally, there’s the Big Kahuna, the thing that I really want to showcase on this website: my stories. I guess you could call me a romantic. I like the heroism and dramatics of a story, the intrigue, and the morality. I loved the idea of feeling so immersed into a world that it feels real to you, that you are actually apart of it. I have always wanted to live a million different lives at once. I’ve wanted to live in a world where dragons roamed the skies, a world where the intrigue, art, and intellectual awakening of the High Renaissance of Italy was still in full glory, a world where there are still new worlds to discover. Unless, science gets real cool with a bunch of stuff really quick, that will never happen and I can just keep dreaming. So instead, I sit at my desk creating these worlds instead, making do with what I have.