It’s official. I’m starting a blog.

It’s about time I finally got on this. I’ve been thinking for months now about the importance of storytelling and how it’s a skill I need to cultivate. I recognized it was important last fall when I wrote my first (and as I write this, only) article for the Vanderbilt Hustler. Yet, I couldn’t ever figure out the right way for me to actually get good at this skill.

I tried journaling a few times last summer, consistently for a few weeks this January, and very sporadically ever since, but it’s asking a lot! I just always feel a sense of significance about everything that’s going on in my day at the time, so I’m unable to successfully cut out the useless information about my day and feel a need to catalog it all, despite the fact that I know I’ll never be able to sift through all of it again if I keep doing that. Ultimately, I realized that some moments in life are definitely worth doing that for. I took note of that for my ASB trip and attempted to keep a record of almost everything we did each day, which was ridiculously difficult since we were up so late every night doing our Life Maps. In the end, I only managed to journal two or three days in depth, but it was worth it. I wish I had been able to record even more, but at the same time I never want to sacrifice any of the depth.1

Since then, I haven’t really seized the opportunity to record my adventures like that. I definitely should have done so for my trip to Nashville at the end of May but the thought barely entered my mind until the trip was over and I was already reminiscing on just how great it had been. Hopefully in the future I will be able to steer myself away from that feeling of needing to record everything. One way I’ve thought about doing this is to not write down the events of the past day each evening, but instead of the day before so my brain had some time to pick out what its automatic filter had deemed important to remember. Until I accomplish that, however, the next best thing will be to do my best to distill the more significant thoughts that cross my mind into blog posts. Hopefully, a few of you may even find what I have to say to be helpful.

  1. Now that I’m thinking about it, there was actually a guy I spoke with after my spring break trip on a reconnecting trip between all of us on our ASB group and Whitsett Elementary who was attempting to make an app that would attempt to solve the problem of remembering what you’ve done in a given day and your mood states across those different activities. I can’t remember exactly what he called it, but it was something like “whatdididotoday.com” [return]