I have been meaning to start a blog for a while now. I first considered the idea back in 2019, and I’ve jotted down post ideas occasionally since then. I even worked on a design back in 2019, but I never finished it.
This was unsurprising to me. I’ve always been a notorious project-hopper. I’d pick up an interesting side project for a few weeks, until some other, more shiny idea came along and I’d start on that instead. I’ve accumulated a larger project graveyard than I care to admit.
A big part of that is anxiety. The idea of putting something I’ve created that’s permanent (or relatively permanent), like writing, out into the world puts me into a high stress response. About 25 percent of people report an intense fear of public speaking,1 but for me, public speaking is significantly less anxiety-inducing than public writing or other forms of more permanent creativity.2 Public speaking is inherently ephermeral—it’s an event. Public writing is inherently permanent. (As the saying goes, “once on the Internet, always on the Internet.”) That evokes a very deep sense of anxiety in me.
Over the last few months, my wife and I have been slowly working our way through The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. In it, Brown discusses embracing our humanness and overcoming perfectionism and fear. Quoting from the book:
Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life-paralysis. Life-paralysis refers to all of the opportunities that we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out into the world that could be imperfect. It’s also all of the dreams that we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes, and disappointing others.
Oof. That description of life-paralysis hit me like a truck—I could clearly see that I had indeed lost (and was losing) opportunities as a result of my perfectionism and fear of judgment.
At the beginning of this year, with the encouragement of my wife, I decided I’d finally do it.
A beginning…
I’m both excited and nervous about putting my thoughts out into the world. Historically, my writing has mostly been stuff I keep to myself, with the occasional post of a musing or insight on Facebook. I intend to change pace here and make this a semi-frequent channel for sharing my ideas and thoughts publicly. That has a very different feel to it than an occasional one-off post shared only with people I know. It’s a bit nerve-wracking. (Realistically, I know that comparatively few people will ever even read this blog, but the anxiety imps in my mind typically aren’t all that concerned with realism.)
However, it’s also invigorating. Writing is a powerful way of making meaning of the complexity of life. When shared with others, it is an incredible tool for communication and the synthesis of new ideas.3 That community side of writing is something I’ve only rarely tapped into. I’m excited to see others respond to, build on, and critique the imperfect thoughts I share here. I’m also excited to develop my own ideas further through the conversations that ensue.
As part of starting this blog, I have a few specific goals. I want to note them here—mostly for myself, but also so that you, as a reader, know what to expect.
- Write more for myself than I do here. If all my writing were to be a public “performance piece”, the personal meaning I derive from it would be reduced.4 Writing for myself is critical for my well-being and learning, in a way that writing publicly, by itself, can’t fulfill. As such, I want to make sure that I continue that kind of writing, even while writing here on a regular basis.
- Read more of others’ thoughts than I write here. The beneficial communal effects of writing can’t occur if I’m only speaking and not listening. Plus, “listen more than you speak” is a good rule to live by in general.
- Be unpolished. I’m not going to let myself endlessly revise my writing. I’m going to choose to be okay with just hitting publish (or “rebase and merge”, as the case may be), even when it doesn’t feel perfect yet. As such, I also reserve the right to adjust my perspectives over time as I learn more. I’ll try to update older articles as that happens, but please evaluate my writing and opinions as a gestalt, and know that I’m always trying to learn.
… in more ways than one
I’m also excited about starting this blog because of what it represents to me: breaking that fear-barrier between me and publishing something I’ve created. The design, the code, and the writing of this site are all my own creation. I didn’t use a blog starter template or a CSS library or have any design or branding decisions handed to me at the start of this project. This website is “my thoughts” not just textually but at a design and engineering level as well.
That’s pretty cool, when you think about it. I made a thing, from scratch, that
other people can enjoy.5 I can
share it with them simply by handing them a sequence of characters
(https://tylermercer.net).6 It’s a piece of my mind that people anywhere
in the world can experience and (hopefully) relate to. Heck, that’s not just
pretty cool, that’s incredible!
My goal is to keep this momentum going, not just in publishing more articles, but in publishing other projects: a website for my wife’s art; a passion project web app that has gone through several iterations but has never been shared; maybe even some art of my own (made with HTML + CSS, of course).
I’m not saying all this to pat myself on the back—just to be open and honest about where I’m at and where I hope to go from here.
I also hope this provides encouragement to anyone else in the same boat. The Internet today is filled with loud and confident voices and creators. If you don’t feel confident or loud, you might feel out of place.
However, I think we need the quiet and hesitant creators now more than ever. In a world of absolutism and reductionism, we desperately need unconfident, careful, nuanced thoughts. We need people creating cool things just for the sake of it—whether that’s a blog, a web app, art, or something else.
To borrow and expand on the words of Chris Coyier, “you’ve got a brain. Lemme hear [or see] that thing go. Write some words [or put something else you created] at a URL.”7
A brief guide to this blog
Most of my posts will fall into one of the two categories shown on the home page: Software and Faith. You can read more about my foundational beliefs in each of these two categories on the About page.
Occasionally, an article won’t fit into these two categories. These articles, as well as the categorized ones, will be shown in reverse chronological order on All Posts.
This blog is also available as an RSS/Atom feed and a JSON feed.
If you would like to contact me for any reason, please get in touch here.
Footnotes
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That’s not to say I don’t get stressed before giving a talk—just that the stress is short-lived, because the event itself is short-lived. In college, I also approached papers in a “short-lived stress” way, writing them in the few hours before they were due. (I actually found I wrote better essays this way.) ↩
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Mark Brooker discusses this idea in “Writing is magic”. ↩
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I very much intend to be accessible and unpolished in my writing here—see goal #3—but, for me, the pressure of how my writing might be perceived by a reader changes how I relate to that writing. ↩
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See “Make Free Stuff” by Max Böck. ↩
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URLs are so dang cool when you think about it. I need to write more about this. ↩
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🧠💭✏️. This post, along with Chris’ many other posts encouraging his readers to write, was another thing that helped tip the scales towards me actually doing this. ↩
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