Why I’m Blogging (and Why It Took So Long to Start)
October 20, 2025
Ten years ago, I spent my 6th grade year at WAVA, an online school program in Washington State. Being so young at the time the transition from my tight-knit private school felt jarring to say the least. My weekdays went from being inside classrooms filled with laughter to a quiet room in front of a computer.
That's not to say it was all bad though. I fell in love with the flexible schedule and had more free time than I knew what to do with. That's when my older brother first introduced me to programming on Khan Academy. I spent this newfound free time on Khan Academy, experimenting with colors, sounds and shapes using a framework called ProcessingJS. My love for programming and the internet sprouted from these early experiences.
With this in mind, it would probably not surprise you to hear I was over the moon when my school offered a blogging class. We were supposed to create blogs with WordPress and make a post each week. I approached this class the way I still approach classes I'm excited for to this day: with all-consuming focus. I spent most of my days between Khan Academy and Wordpress. For whatever reason I wanted to make my blog all about natural disasters while my classmates picked normal topics like art, creative writing, or cooking.
After the school year ended, I moved to Texas and went to a different school, and I slowly forgot about my old weather blog. Somewhere between then and now I drifted away from reading and writing. I like to think of the period between 2016 and 2022 as my personal Dark Ages. I used to devour books and fill up notebooks with my writing. I still keep my composition notebooks of short stories in a shoebox in my closet, relics from a another time.
Starting college was like a Renaissance for me. At a time where I felt like I had no idea who I was, what I wanted, or what I liked, I felt drawn to my childhood obsessions. I'd like to think that I'm becoming someone that would've inspired me 10 years ago. In my Dark Ages I struggled with this feeling that I wanted to run as far as I could from who I was in my early years, thinking it would make me better. These days I'm walking the other direction, picking up the pieces I dropped along the way. At the same time, I'm starting to forgive myself for leaving it behind.
One of these pieces is reading and writing, that's why I'm blogging right now, but the truth is that this blog has been in my plans for almost 4 years. I've had some form of a personal website since about 2020, and I've made a few attempts at creating a blog since around 2022. The issue would always come down missing features I wanted it or overcomplicated setups that I would get sick of.
The turning point was discovering Zola. Pretty quickly I added a blog to my personal website with little work.
It feels like an anticlimactic ending after the amount of time I spent on this, to be honest. Starting now, I plan on making a post once a week (hopefully), speaking my mind or sharing something from my interests.