Catching Thoughts

So this is long overdue.

I’ve been asked many times why, as someone who loves to write so much, I’ve never kept a blog or a journal or some kind of written record of miscellaneous thoughts and goings-on in my life. I promise it’s not for lack of trying; I’ve got a handful of unfinished diaries left over from childhood, each one with no more than a few entries. I think the main problem I’ve had with journaling is that I’m so used to keeping everything inside my mind. This is the same reason why I have so much trouble keeping calendars—my roommates can vouch for the fact that I hung a calendar on my wall at the beginning of freshman spring, excited to finally maintain some kind of schedule, and then updated it for all of two weeks. For as long as I can remember, my mind has been my trusted storage place for all kinds of personal information; putting it all down somewhere seemed to go against my nature.

These struggles to put my life down on a piece of paper, digital or otherwise, are the main reasons why when I write, I almost always write fiction. I write about complex characters unlike me in most major ways, living in worlds unlike my own, fighting through scenarios I’ve rarely ever faced before. There’s something cathartic about being able to escape into the mind of someone else, since mine has always been so very private.

So, long story short, blogging will be an entirely new adventure for me. The reason I’ve decided to give it a shot, though, is because I need to get better at sharing my words, mostly for my own benefit. You see, I’ve been feeling recently that I need to get to know myself better, and the best way I can think to do that is by helping others to get to know me better, even if it is just through small blocks of text containing glimpses of my thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll include here yet. This is somewhat of an experiment. But you can expect to hear numerous accounts of my travels, since starting this year I’ve finally begun to see more of the world and I can’t seem to talk about it enough. You can expect some rambling accounts of the trials and tribulations of being a Harvard sophomore. And you can certainly expect to hear me talk about writing, and words, and fictional worlds, since those are what I’m passionate about above everything else.

Here goes nothing.