About

When I graduated college, I felt like an idiot.

Maybe “idiot” is a strong word. But I certainly didn’t feel as smart graduating college as I thought I would when starting college. It felt like I was handed a diploma in a major I still didn’t really understand with a transcript of coursework I had already forgotten. And with that day representing quite possibly the end of my formal education, it was pretty terrifying.

I wanted some sort of mechanism to make sure that whether or not I ever sat in a classroom desk again, I wouldn’t stop learning and thinking about things and forming thoughts. And so in May of 2021, I set out on a mission: write one thought at the end of every day. Anything. It could be an essay. It could be a sentence. It could be anything in between about anything in the world. It just had to be something that in that moment I felt was true.

And I’ve been doing it ever since. One thought a day has slowly turned into a few thoughts a week as  I’ve realized having thoughts is cool but having a reasonable bedtime is cooler. But I’ve gotten enough value out of it to keep carving the time out every week, and it has slowly evolved into something much more than just a learning mechanism. I’ve always been and probably will always be half as eloquent as I’d like, and I hate being in a conversation with a friend and feeling some nebulous idea on my tongue that I want to say but can’t effectively put into words. This blog is my training ground for figuring out how to say exactly what I mean and nothing more and nothing less. On top of that, I’ve always loved writing and was a journalism minor, and this project is a great way to keep that muscle active.

I post all of these thoughts on my blog Speaking of Which, and this newsletter is an extension of that blog. At the end of each month, I’ll be selecting a few of my favorite posts and wrapping them up in a bite-sized newsletter for any subscribers. You have to be pretty conceited to think that everyone cares what you think about everything, and so I fully expect the main consumer of these blog posts will always be myself. But you also have to be pretty ignorant to think that nobody cares what you think about anything, and so if I’m going to be writing these posts anyways, I might as well share them.

Think of this newsletter as a verbal map of my brain. A database of all the things I've thunk. Some of it will be abrasive. Some of it will be insightful. Some of it will be uncomfortably sensitive. And some of it will be utterly forgettable. But that's the beautiful thing about brains: they tend to be all these things at once.