And sometimes, blogs

Tag: Self-Reflection (Page 1 of 2)

A series of blog posts in which I reflect on the kind of person I am.

Love the journey, not the destination

Once, a long time ago, I was told there are two kinds of writers. There are those who love writing—who delight in the craft of it, the mental and physical labor of putting words to paper or screen, to construct the narrative their heart yearns to share—because to them, that effort is no labor at all.

And then there are those who love having written—the dreamers, the thinkers, the ones who say for years that they’re working on a novel, with most of that time spent imagining the finished product and taking no tangible steps to get there. In short, they’re the ones who don’t actually write.

But this post isn’t about writing. It’s not about any one particular subject, or activity, or even logical context. It’s about healing from trauma, and the inner strength it takes to stick to the difficult path. It’s about mortality, and finding meaning in a nihilistic universe whose lifespan is just as finite as yours. It’s about life, the universe, and everything, and also nothing at all, because it’s about a frame of mind that can be applied to just about any situation to make it better or more bearable. It’s about enduring.

It’s about the journey.

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Getting hyped on tools you won’t use

A few years ago, the writing app Scrivener was gearing up for its next major release. Scrivener for Windows v3.0 had been in beta for ages, with a long list of new features to bring the app (mostly) up to par with its macOS older sibling. My writer friends and I were hyped as all heck for the shiny new software, even contributing to the beta testing cycle a little bit because we were so impatient to start using v3.0 for real.

And then, finally, after multiple months of delays, Scrivener for Windows v3.0 was officially released! I cheered internally and immediately bought the non-trial version of the app… And then I forgot all about it, and never used it, because I never used the previous versions of Scrivener to begin with.

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I do a lot of things as a joke

I’ve been thinking about this part of my personality a lot lately. There are lots of things I like and/or do that are objectively silly, and probably shouldn’t be taken seriously, but I do them sincerely anyway to add to the joke.

I don’t quite think it’s the same as “doing things ironically.” There’s a very specific feel to all of these things; it’s not just being dumb for the sake of being edgy. It’s more like… an elevation of sorts. Taking a silly idea and respecting it in its own right, laughing with it instead of at it. If that even makes sense.

Anyway, here’s some examples.

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That One Insignificant Moment

There was a morning, back when I was in middle school. The bus was turning up the school’s little hill of a driveway, and I was lying back, tired, trying to squeeze just another minute or two of rest out of the morning before I had to face an entire day at school. It was a typical morning, similar to hundreds of others before it, and probably after it. A completely unexceptional, worthless moment of transition between the parts of the day that actually mattered.

And somehow, for some reason, I realized all of that in that moment.

I realized I was living through the most mundane, unremarkable moment in time. A moment that would soon be forgotten by everyone on the bus, including myself, because what reason was there to remember it? A moment so defined by its insignificance that, in just a few more days, or hours, or maybe even minutes, it would be like that moment never happened at all.

So I decided to remember it.

I didn’t want that moment to not matter. I didn’t want that moment to be as insignificant as it was destined to be. I didn’t want it to be forgotten and therefore die, losing every effect it ever had on anyone who lived through it.

I couldn’t rescue every moment in eternity from its inevitable oblivion, but I could rescue that moment, on that one day, on that one morning, on that utterly insignificant bus ride before school.

And so I remember it. I remember all the silly things that were going through my head as I made that vow of remembrance, which I’ve now shared here (without too much extra dramatization—I was a dramatic child, inside my own head).

I remember the feeling of defiance that went into the act, the feeling of struggle against an impossible enemy—eternity itself. The feeling of borrowed/mutual insignificance, because I too was just screaming against the void of Forever. Someday I would be forgotten too, and the world would move on as if I never existed.

But for now at least, for just one lifetime, I could remember—and therefore keep alive—that one insignificant moment.

Remembering Bionicle

As I alluded to at the end of my previous post, I moved last month. It’s been a rush of busy-ness since then: unpacking, building new furniture, and all sorts of minor-but-exhausting time traps. But things have started to settle down in recent weeks, which means I finally had the chance to do something that’s been on my to-do list for a very long time: opening my long-sealed Bionicle collection.

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Sprint System Retrospective

In mid-2021, I posted about my productivity tracking systems over the years. How I evolved from setting vague and directionless New Year’s Resolutions to obsessively tracking all my projects and their progress in bi-weekly Agile sprints like a good little programmer mule. I predicted that the Sprints system would fail within another year or so, based on my track record with my productivity tracking systems. So, was I right?

Yes. I was.

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Can I write a new blog post every month?

I’ve wanted to have a blog for years. To have a platform to share my thoughts with the world; to build up a cool and diverse archive of posts on a variety of subjects; to follow in the footsteps of my all favorite authors who have blogs of their own, that they use to keep their fans updated on upcoming book news and whatnot. Somewhere I can post for posterity, outside of the disposable content mills that make up modern social media.

And then I finally created jessepirnat.com. I’ve had the means to start my ideal blog for almost 3 years now… So why haven’t I done it yet?

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