Why i'm doing this!

Hi! This is my first blog post! Phwoooo, that’s a rush.

Here are some of my goals for my site, in no particular order.

Goal 1: Doing stuff! Being less perfectionistic!

This took me a loong time. Not making this website, or this blog post, but, any website at all. I’ve made a ton of webpages over the past year and a half, and declared each one insufficient. Trying to make something I really thought was beautiful was too personal, to easy to idealize.

But this? Claude made it in like 5 seconds. I just want to start something sticky to accumulate. I don’t find this iteration particularly appealing; I hope to make it more neocities-esque in the coming months. But that’s ok! It’s good enough to add everything else to! And it’s lower pressure than substack, because I anticipate that there will be far fewer eyes on here.

I am perfectionistic in most areas of my life. I want to approach this website as a practice of just putting stuff out there, even if I wish it was better. So, I have a prediction: this website will help me build a habit of overcoming perfectionism when it is useful to.

Goal 2: Big project makes organization tasks easier?

I want a scrapbook! I want to contribute to a project more legible than my hundreds of pages of journals. I want a silly little place to get silly little dopamine hits from posting silly little word salads.

It’s fun to group the stuff I like. While I sometimes collect quotes, books I’ve read, blog posts I like, etc., they get lost. I write most of my thoughts and to-dos in one document, since I don’t enjoy navigating lots of different ones. And, I start a new one every few months because they get gargantuan and slow down my computer, but I don’t always consolidate lists from old journals.

I feel like it might be easier here, to maintain longer collections. It’ll take higher activation energy to update, but seems more enjoyable as well. There’s more ritual in it, more relish to be taken. And since it’s one ongoing project, it might avoid the failure mechanism of turnover.

Goal 3: Have fun??

Friends will vouch: over the past year, I had a weird sense of obligation towards having a website. Like, that I should, morally, have a website. I think this came from having all the same logical motivations pushing me towards making one, and focusing on those, rather than thinking about if it would be fun. I wasn’t approaching it with a sense of play, a sense of it’s-all-chill-ness.

Once I got over the should-ing, I was able to access the part of me that wanted it because it seemed enjoyable. It’s something I want to do for me. :))

This is less of a goal I want to achieve with a website, and more a goal I have in framing it.

Goal 4: New lens for conversations with loved ones

I love reading what my friends write; It’s important to see your loved ones outside of the relationship’s typical context. I have a feeling that seeing what I’m thinking about will surprise some of ma people… probably less so my friends, but definitely some of my family. And putting out legible ideas will allow space for people to build upon or critique them! I predict this’ll spur interesting conversations.

It also gives us something external to look at together, which is one of my favorite things. Reading books with friends, admiring a painting—looking at things together lets people surprise you with how they see the world.

In thinking about something new, you grow. Parts of you (which may not have existed before that stimulus) can unfold. By looking at things with your loved ones, you get to unfold (grow, change) together. When I think about this idea, I have a strong mental image of two vines twining together—you’re growing outward, interdependently, building off one another and strengthening your relationship. It gives your relationship shared references… Like built-in inside jokes, but for shared language and framings. Argh, I want to write something longer about this, and why I find it so important, because it feels like I’m missing something.

Goal 5: Poke my avoidance of being publicly perceived

It freaks me out to think of stuff I make being put on the internet. Being seen so publicly makes me stiffen. I’m wondering if it’s related to having been media trained when I was in middle school? This feeling expands to more than just the internet—I feel a similarly anxious tension when groups of people focus their attention on me. There’s probably something here to be listened to, but I think there’s also a tension to be relaxed or a way to become more secure. I can’t tell if this is just the same thing as the perfectionism.

I predict that I will come to understand this aversion better through having a website. I think there’s a chance it will be useful practice in releasing the tensions underlying it, but I’m less sure about that.

Goal 6: Word better. Think better?

I write so much, but most of it is unintelligible to anyone but me. Sometimes, to me as well! I want to use this site to practice writing more understandably, more often.

Of course, I want to get better at communicating my thoughts in writing, but I also have a niggling little hope that doing so will make me better at communicating in general. I worry that my habit of writing in scribbles is making me less understandable, fortifying bad habits—I wonder if writing publicly will help build a more intuitive translation mechanism between mentalese and other-people-speak.

I also think that producing more finished products might give me a more solid world model and concrete opinions, rather than vibes. And help me understand which of my ideas really are just vibes.

Goal 7: Create a personally tailored search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to my inbox

This used to feel more salient; less so now. I have a lot of friends who send me interesting stuff… I actually feel like there’s not enough time for all the cool stuff! But I’m still quite open to it, and I love meeting new folks :) (reach out!!! zschurman (at) brandeis (dot) edu !!) It would be an awesome outcome if this created interesting interactions with strangers, though I don’t expect it.

I plan to revisit this post and its predictions, in, say, a year, to see if they check out. See ya then!