I was an avid blogger in the early 2000's, writing posts at least once a day and pouring my heart and soul out.

I had no filters and wrote about my co-workers, my boss, my (most often lack of) relationships, really everything that currently occupied my mind.

It was embarrassing, and yet it was the best time I had on the internet so far. My website was hand-crafted, I had poems on it, and MIDI-Files of my compositions. A livecam Java applet was mostly for my parents who, at the time, were living in the Caribbeans.

I had quite a following – the blog was powered by Movable Type, every single post had at least one comment, and my phpBB forum grew constantly. I even met some of my girlfriends there.

When my mom passed away (while being in the Carribeans), I felt the need to change my life. I moved to Cologne, started studying and became a freelance developer. My studies didn't come to fruition, but I thrived as a freelancer.

This, together with the emergence of Facebook, has sucked my drive and creativity out of me – I shut down my website and was never able to regain it since.

Every few years I tried to jump start a new blog, and failed after one or two posts. I thought I had to provide some kind of value, but I didn't think I had something valuable to say, neither personally nor professionally: everything I wanted to write about, others have already written about it, why should anybody read my stuff?

Also, I had too high expectations of myself: being a software developer, I had to build my site from scratch or at least find a WordPress theme that supports everything I needed, not knowing what I actually needed.

I was doomed to failure.

Yesterday, I remembered why I had so much fun with my first website:

I didn't care.

I didn't care if I might come over unprofessionally. I didn't care if what I wrote was useful (back then, it mostly wasn't). I didn't care who might read it, just that they don't have to if they don't want to. I didn't overthink it.

Long story short: this is another (and probably final) attempt to restart writing down what's on my mind when it's on my mind, and to not care (too much) what others might think.

I stumbled upon write.as a while ago already, and now bought a yearly subscription. Let's see if I can re-find the drive I had when I was half my age!

#personal #introduction