January 1, 2016

New Year’s Day

Some years you want to pause at the end and reflect. Some years you want to remember the things you learned, the people you met, the love you felt, the places you visited, the things you accomplished. Some years you are sad to say farewell. Some years you run headlong into the next year with high hopes, declaring that you can’t wait to see what it has in store for you.

Some years you want to light the year on fire and walk away while it burns.

This year is the second kind.

My official excuse for taking so long to do anything with this space: graduate school. Specifically, comprehensive exams.

My real reason: perfectionism and the fear of failure.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to choose colours, figure out what the best layout is, come up with an awesome posting schedule, figure out whether this was primarily a blog or a portfolio, and write an amazing first post that would lay out all of the fabulous things that are going to happen in this space. Essentially, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make this into a highly professional website. And then I realized something; I am not a professional. I’m not a professional blogger. I’m not a professional writer. I’m not a professional photographer. I don’t have to know what I’m doing. I don’t have to have everything figured out yet.

So, this is me just diving right in. It feels a bit like a cliff dive, which, admittedly, is something I’ve never done and something that would inevitably result in a watery grave. Maybe that isn’t the best analogy. It feels a bit like stepping off of the platform at the top of a zip line. That’s better. I’ve done that. I actually love that.

I have no idea what this space is going to become. I do know it will house both my photography and my poetry. It will probably house longer-form writing pieces. It will also probably house a ridiculous number of quotations, because I am a quotation junkie. There will probably be notes on what I’m reading and watching and listening to. There will probably be links to articles and poems that I think other people need to read. It probably won’t have anything to do with my academic work because I feel like this should be a mental space where I can walk away from all of that. Then again, it probably will have everything to do with my academic work since it would be ridiculous to suggest that there is no overlap between my academic pursuits and my creative ones.

Like Morag, all I want is everything, so everything is what you will get here.