The Story

It is fair that the first post elaborates a bit more on the why, i.e. how did I get here. I 've seen others naming similar posts The Story, so I decided to steal it. It is concise and descriptive, so it works for me.

Image by _marioosh via Pixabay.

In my About post, I already explain that, I decided to start this substack out of my love for writing. And if I could reply to the why with one sentence, that would be it.
But writing alone, doesn't push one to write their thoughts and publish them online. I have been keeping a journal for more than a decade and I could simply keep doing that. I am still doing that, by the way. But not just that anymore.

Maybe a bit of history about how my journal-keeping evolved, is relevant here. I started keeping a journal somewhere around 2009. The reason was that, one of my favorite Greek artists had issued one and someone who knew how much I liked that artist, gave it to me as a present. It was a bit unconventional, because it had small jokes and silly questions for every day of the year. Questions like “how much do you weigh”, “did you have sex today” or “what did you dream about last night”. Initially, I was trying to write something every day. And by initially, I mean the first years. The upside of that was that, I kept the habit going, without too much effort. I would spend a few minutes every day, or maybe every two days and log what happened the day(s) before. The downside was that, it was just a log. And I consider that a downside, because there are many days in a year, that nothing worth writing happens. As a result, there were days that I was just logging what I had for dinner, or which class I had attended that day. High quality literature.

Image by Tessakay via Pixabay.

Eventually, the goal shifted from, write-something-every-day-no-matter-how-meaningless-it-is, to write-only-once-every-few-days-but-focus-on-the-things-that-are-worth-mentioning. That also meant that, it became more challenging to maintain the habit, because it was no longer part of my daily routine. I would write maybe a couple of times a week. And what about when I was away for vacation? Would I take my journal with me? I knew I wouldn’t use it every day, so I didn’t want to carry the extra weight for nothing; I also did not want to stay away from writing for one, or even two weeks at a time. So writing became easier, because it was no longer a chore, but it was harder to discipline myself to write regularly. The upside became the downside and vice versa.

Over time, my approach to what was worth mentioning in the journal, also shifted. And over time, once again implies a time span of years, not weeks. Slowly, important life events gave place to thoughts and feelings. It was still a mix of the two, but slowly and steadily, I didn’t feel like I needed to simply log incidents; my writing could now be expanded to the feelings those incidents triggered. Or even just write down feelings and thoughts that came to me, without any obvious physical cue, without the occurrences of my daily life instigating it. And that step from events to feelings, was kind of a breakthrough. Writing about it now, sounds silly and self-evident. “Of course you can write about your feelings in your journal”. I see it now, but back then, it was not as obvious¹. Nothing was stopping me of course, I just didn’t see it. It took me years to figure out that you ‘re not supposed to use a screwdriver to put a nail on the wall. Well you can, but it will take ages.

From that point on, the thoughts about starting a blog/newsletter and in general publishing my writing online, started creeping in. Once that barrier of topics I could write about was overcome, it wasn’t only feelings that I felt I wanted to write about, but also ideas and topics that may have nothing to do with my daily life. And that became the main motivation to write.

Language

Even though in my personal journal I -almost- always write in Greek, it was clear to me from the first moment, that I wanted to write this substack in English. The first reason is that, after all these years abroad, where my everyday life takes place mostly in English, I feel comfortable thinking and conversating in English, so expressing my thoughts equally well, should not be a problem. Yes, my native language is Greek, but when everything around you happens in a given language, then you eventually start thinking directly in said language. There is no need to translate words and expressions in your mind, before eventually formulating them.

Image by Tessakay via Pixabay.

The second and most important reason, is that the pool of people who can understand Greek in this planet is very limited. And since I took the decision to publish my thoughts online, I would like to be able to reach as many people as possible. I consider having even a single person reading my posts a success; conversely, I would consider it a huge failure, if even a single person wanted to read my posts and couldn’t, because they did not know Greek. In addition, many of my friends are not Greek, and I would not like to exclude them. In fact, I would very much like to hear their thoughts and feedback, especially in the posts pertaining to the Greek culture².

Publishing

Writing your thoughts is one thing; publishing them is a completely different one. I don’t have such a clear answer regarding why I preferred writing online, instead of writing my ideas on a piece of paper and then keeping it in a drawer. Maybe because, even though something like that makes perfect sense when it comes to feelings, it is not the same with ideas. Ideas are meant to be shared, discussed and argued upon, while it might not necessarily be the same with feelings. Sometimes they are better kept just for us. But ideas that are not shared, may be ideas that go to waste. Ted’s moto, ideas worth spreading, encapsulates this nicely. So wanting to write about something more than private feelings, urged me to write things, that may (or may not) increase in value by sharing them.

Image by Cheerfully_lost via Pixabay.

Another reason I wanted to publish my thoughts, is because I like to challenge myself. One of my biggest fears, is becoming too settled in my comfort zone and stop trying to get out of it, or expand it. Exposing myself through writing, is definitely something I am not comfortable with, and that is a good enough reason to try it.

You might argue that, I am not really exposing myself if nobody is reading my posts. That would be correct and actually highly likely. But I cannot know that beforehand. And even if it does happen for a long period of time, I cannot know that nobody will ever read my posts, unless I stop writing them. And even if in the end, I am still in doubt about whether there was even a single reader, well then I can always console myself at the thought that, maybe there was one, but they were too shy to reveal themselves. And in all those scenarios, whether there is a chance that there is a single, or 1 million readers out there, I will still have taken the step to write something and post it online.

- The Naive Ignorant

1. It never is.

2. Hold tight, there are plenty coming.