#1: Not My First Post

There is a certain allure and terror to putting one’s thoughts online.

The allure: Here I am, documenting myself for anyone on the Internet to read, evidence of who I was and what mattered to me while I was alive.

The terror: What if someone I know sees this? Uses my words against me? Finds my writing underpowered, mindless, with no creativity or depth?

This is not my first post. I have been here, online, for a while. I suspect many folks who grew up in the 1990s learned to enjoy curating a digital nook for themselves through the same pipeline: Neopets and Xanga taught us web design – or, more truthfully, how to tweak someone else’s HTML and CSS to suit our own pre-teen aesthetics – while LiveJournal and Blogspot introduced us to a mature community of writers dedicated to sending their words off into the void. I hesitate between despair and gratitude knowing my Top Friends list, GuitarBand recordings, and sad, cryptic musings (meant to get the attention of a crush, I admit; here’s one I recall: I wish I were a bird with soaring wings… so I could fly far away from here…) were purged from memory when MySpace messed up its database migration in 2019. Somewhere still on the Internet, however, my ninth grade poetry remains self-published, its lovesick verses now over sixteen years old, up on a site that hopefully cannot be traced back to my name and therefore will never send me spiraling into embarrassment at its discovery. Just once, a fellow blogger, an older woman¹, left an encouraging comment about a poem of mine there. One does not forget that sort of kindness.

The allure and terror of our online corners. [src]

Even if my teenage blogging phase was such a formative experience for me, I cannot get over the thought that posting online now, in my thirties, is pure frivolity, a luxury of time and brain-space incompatible with my growing list of responsibilities. A writer earns legitimacy through publication: the process of getting other people to cosign on the merit of your work. An emerging (unpublished, unknown) writer should, I suppose, make every effort to gain that support – any ray of recognition to get me out of the dark. But instead of trying to propel myself into the bright literary commons, I seem to be withdrawing into my hidden online corner where, without discovery features or comment sections or viewership metrics, this writing will sit by itself until my credit card expires and, in another turn of the cycle, this domain name is resold to the next Micah Lau².

Won’t I submit to journals? Why not just make a Substack? Why post at all?

I am writing for myself here. This is not professional development or literary art; this is just for fun. Fiction-making has rules and limits that require more concentration than I have been able to gather these past few months. But blogging? I have enjoyed my time writing this “first post” more than any other dissertation drafting session. If working on my novel is an intense solo heavy-weight hypertrophic lift, blogging is an aimless walk around the suburbs, looking into windows as I pass, taking in the smell of someone’s cooking or assimilating the noise of TVs, children, cars, dogs, lawnmowers, leaf blowers into a soundscape of domestic peace instead of a reminder of the clamor that goes on forever inside my head. Writing a post: I am going out for a walk – that is all. I am not going anywhere. I’m coming right back.

Where my mind walks as I type this post. [src]

This return to the familiar workflows of my software engineering days also feels good, the flexing of a muscle that has gone underworked a while. Here, I can relive the thrill of a git commit with none of the worry that I’d broken something business-critical. On a personal website, I can adjust everything relentlessly, neurotically – I’m not just concerned about too many adverbs, but also whether another 0.01 on the line-height helps readability; maybe a lighter color for links? – as if the ethos and aesthetics of the presentation were an extension of the language, giving what I write some added significance, however minor. In 2007, I shrank and centered my poem about birds, hoping that negative space would make me seem elegant, profound. Today, I narrow the width of the text container to convey a sense of rigor and organization that may not really be there.

In truth, I do expect to compose these posts, these micro-essays, with as much actual skill as I can gather. (Recall my fear at the top of the page, how bad it would be to be discovered as a fraud by someone Googling my name.) If I tell my students that all writing is practice for more important writing, then I must listen to my own advice. The warm-up for these thoughts here, I realize only at this moment, was that horrible MySpace poetry I agonized over so many years ago, full of pointless enjambment and unearned drama. I can only hope that in two short decades, I will look back on this post the same way and wonder what in the world I was thinking.