Why I started this blog, and why I almost didn't

I almost didn’t.

Not because I didn’t have anything to say. I have too much to say, actually. But because I have chosen to be a private person, especially in recent years. Someone who watches from the edges, who shares carefully and selectively, who feels genuinely uncomfortable with the idea of people looking at her life and forming opinions about it. Pity, judgment, or even admiration, all of it makes me squirm.

So no, a blog was never really on my radar.

It started with my cousin.

When he passed away a few years ago, someone had to gather the pieces of his life. The photos with family, with friends, with classmates. Someone had to put them together into something we could play at his wake. That someone ended up being me. I collected everything I could find, made a few videos, and uploaded them to YouTube because the files were too large to play properly from a USB drive on the TV.

I sat in that room and watched people watch him. His whole life, distilled into a few minutes of photographs set to music. And I thought:

This is what’s left when someone is gone. The things other people saved of them.

After that, I kept the channel. Started uploading other things: my travels, some small moments, whatever felt worth keeping. Although I admit, I could’ve uploaded so much more than I have (editing videos is just a lot of work!). Not for an audience. I never broadcast it to anyone. I just needed to know that something of me existed somewhere, out in the world, findable, even if no one was looking.

Because here’s the thing about being private: it can tip, slowly and quietly, into invisibility.

I’ve watched myself do it. The social media accounts trimmed down to almost nothing. The inner circle pruned so carefully that sometimes I wonder if the people left in it actually want to be there, or if I’m just sending messages into a silence I’ve mistaken for intimacy. I overthink. I always have.

What I didn’t want was to get to the end of my life and have no one be able to do for me what I did for my cousin. Not because I wasn’t loved, but because I hid myself so thoroughly that there was nothing left to find.

So why a blog, if I’m still such a private person?

Because of what that YouTube channel taught me. I don’t need to broadcast myself. I don’t need to show up in anyone’s feed uninvited. But I can exist somewhere, fully and honestly, so that if anyone ever goes looking, they’ll find me.

I won’t show up in your life when you don’t want me to. But you’ll find me when you look.

That’s what this is. A place to put the things I want to remember: the travels, the thoughts, the lessons I keep forgetting and having to relearn. A record of a life being lived with intention, even when the intention is messy and uncertain. A mark, made quietly, on my own terms.

The cancer helped too, if I’m being honest. Not in any poetic, silver-lining kind of way, but in the way it forces you to look at time differently. There’s nothing like a diagnosis to remind you that time is not guaranteed, and that the life you keep meaning to document is happening right now, whether you’re paying attention or not.

I have big plans and big dreams. I always have. And for a long time, I kept them mostly to myself. Afraid to say them out loud, afraid of the weight of other people’s expectations or the sting of their doubt.

But I’ve decided I’d rather leave something than leave nothing.

So here I am. A little late, maybe. But nothing is on pause anymore.

Everything is on purpose.