I fear writing. Despite having written quite a lot in the past and having found comfort doing so, I now fear writing. It feels strange and sad like losing myself to admit such a fear, but it is an important first step to a cure.
I used to answer questions on Quora [1], and used to feel generally positive about my answers. When I meet a stranger, I would show them one of my Quora answers, give them a TL;DR, or just talk about the topic and content of an answer without mentioning it is a Quora answer, and before I realized it, we have been down into a good conversation.
It feels sad losing this ability. As much as writing helped me think and speak more coherently, not writing has made my thoughts cluttered and my speech awkward. These days, whenever I must write something, I pause very often. I would immediately check if my choice of words is awkward (they often are), if my flow is fluent (it often is not), or if my grammar is correct (it’s often wrong). (See, the previous sentence took multiple revisions, and read very awkward).
Things are even worse when I speak. Before I finish a sentence, I would start to panic whether I have cluttered something nobody understands. While speaking, I would watch my listener to check if they are showing signs of irritation listing to me. And while I watch them in fear, an internal voice would start questioning me if I really had to speak so much; could I have expressed my ideas in much fewer words and hence, have I been annoying my listeners, etc.
These noisy voices break my mental state of writing or speaking. The breakage in turn worsens my words and speeches, and eventually makes me lose all confident in expressing myself.
Today, I start curing these fears by starting this personal blog.
As writing goes, I might need a topic to write about. (see, I just ended my sentence with a proposition – what an achievement!) I will write the entry about how to technically start a blog.
To me, the most important first step is to choose a platform. The platform should be simple, even minimalistic, ideally like E.B. White’s typewritter and ashtray in “On Writing Well” [2]. But I also want the platform to be rich enough so that eventually I can write on topics I have not intended today, perhaps maths, machine learning, chess, whiskey, or Japanese literature.
When searching for a platform to write, being minimalistic is a nice constraint,
as it leaves me with very few options. This blog post is written in markdown,
which in my opinion is as simple as it can get.
Using VsCode, I can write locally on my half of my laptop screen and immediately
seeing the result rendered on the other half, and then I can commit it to my
github.io using simple git commands.
I have also tried to write LaTeX in markdown, and at least my VsCode can
render them. If I ever want to publish blog entries with math formulae, which I
might soon, it will be a simple plug-and-play problem, rather than a possible
vs. impossible one. For now, let me just try to see the following simple line
can just render:
\((x + y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2\)
If it does not render on my browser or my phone, it’s just fine. I will come
back to this later. At least, markdown is an improvement in terms of rendering
ability compared to Paul Graham’s
essays which I have enjoyed reading.
There goes my first blog entry. One day, may I read these lines and realize how awkward they are. But now, for my own goodness, they should go public. This is not because I am confident these lines are good, but I am proud that I have overcome this very primal fear to just write something.