Building This Page

For most of the last three years, all of this stayed in a single notes app, in entries only I ever read. This site started as an experiment in doing that same writing somewhere other people could see it, which sounds like a small shift and turned out to be a much bigger one than I expected.

Privately, I only ever had to be honest with myself, which is a lower bar than it sounds like — you can be pretty selective about what counts as honest when there’s no reader to catch you rounding up. Publishing means someone might actually read the entry where I lost two months of practice to shame, or the one where I still can’t fully explain why I cried twice on a retreat floor. Normally I’d share the tidy conclusion after the fact, not the part where I’m visibly still working it out.

That’s more or less the whole point, once I sat with the discomfort of it. The version of me that wants to publish only finished, coherent thoughts is the same version that wants credit for a meditation streak, or a tidy checklist of virtues completed — the one practice keeps quietly dismantling. Publishing the unfinished, sometimes-wrong version of my own understanding is a small, practical exercise in letting that self go, in public, on purpose.

If I wait until I fully understand something before writing about it, I’ll never publish anything. So this is what half-understanding looks like, out loud.

Building the actual pages was the easy part, comparatively — deciding what belonged on a Learn page versus a Journey entry, writing descriptions that didn’t oversell what a beginner three years in can actually offer. The harder decision was closer to this one: letting old entries about grief and lost momentum sit on a public shelf instead of staying folded into a private drawer where only I had to look at them.

I don’t know if anyone will read this. I’ve decided that’s genuinely not the point — the practice was always the writing down, honestly, before I knew whether anyone was listening. Publishing it just means I have to keep meaning that.