This is maybe the fifth time I've rebuilt my journal website. I've lost count. And each time, I read back through what I've written and find mostly the same thing: abstract reflections on minimalism, on perfectionism. Important stuff, sure. But somewhere along the way, I stopped telling stories.
I used to write about the actual texture of days. Now I skip straight to the conclusion. I've been editing out the very parts worth keeping.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: I overlook things. Chronically. My brain runs a ruthless filter—not useful, not interesting, everyone already knows this—and quietly discards most of what life actually is. It's the same perfectionism that haunts everything else I do. I'm always hunting for the 1%, which means I'm constantly throwing away the other 99%. And that 99%? Sometimes it's the whole point.
The breakfast my mom made. What someone said on the squash court. Why the Vercel build crashed at 2am. The stranger at the airport. These aren't footnotes. These are the thing itself.
There's another reason to write small things down, and it has nothing to do with the future reader. Writing forces a different kind of thinking. Not the shower-thought kind, not the commute-walk kind—those are fine, they happen, ideas arrive. But sitting down and putting words on a page is its own cognitive mode. Slower. More honest. You start writing about something ordinary and, somewhere in the middle of a sentence, you discover something you didn't know you thought. That doesn't happen if you only write when you already have a fully formed reflection ready to go.
So the new rule is simple: just start. The birds outside. The wind. What you built today. What you ate. Write it down, and let the thinking follow. Don't wait for the groundbreaking insight. Don't wait to feel like it's worth it.
It's worth it. It was always worth it.