Coming Back
Coming Back
Recently, I’ve felt that familiar and restless tug—the one that insists I should be writing again. Not just jotting down scattered notes in the margins of my day, but actual writing, the sort that hums with intention. I even flirted with the idea of reinvention. I opened a fresh account on Substack, tossed out a few short posts, and waited for the spark to catch. But it didn’t. Something felt… off. Like putting on a perfectly tailored coat only to realize it wasn’t mine.
When my wife, Leslie, asked what I was up to, I tried to explain. “I’ve always loved writing,” I said, fumbling the words like chalk dust slipping through my hands. I mentioned my old blog—some relic of a former self—and half-joked that it was probably still floating out there in the digital ether, archived like an old, neglected library book.
That offhand comment nagged at me. So, of course, I did what any obsessive academic of the digital age would do: I went searching. A few Google queries later, there it was—my old blog, still intact, still waiting like an abandoned classroom with desks covered in doodles and forgotten notes.
Reading those early posts was equal parts amusing and excruciating. Most of the writing is, frankly, bad. Not gloriously bad, but mundanely so—stiff, clumsy, over-eager. I treated the blog much like we now treat social media: impulsive blurts, trivialities dressed as revelations. But buried under all that noise was the first spark, the earliest recognition that I loved this act of shaping thought into language. This was where I started.
And so, I faced a choice: wipe the slate clean and create a brand-new space, or return to the origins, dust and all. The temptation to start fresh was strong—after all, isn’t that what we’re told to do? Delete the rough drafts, polish the image, curate the self. But it felt dishonest. Every story, whether mythic or mundane, has an origin. To erase it would be to deny that I stumbled, learned, and occasionally embarrassed myself on the way here. Why pretend we were always polished? Why exile the evidence of imperfection?
After some deliberation—and a small war with forgotten passwords—I decided to reclaim this old space. To return, like a scholar who wanders back to their first notebook, half ashamed of the messy scrawls but unwilling to burn them. This blog will not only be a record of my writing but, I hope, a gathering place for my photography, my creative meanderings, and whatever other sparks demand expression.
Of course, it is entirely possible that no one will ever read this. Perhaps these words will sit here, undisturbed, like lecture notes left in a forgotten drawer. And that’s fine. In a strange way, that feels comforting. The value isn’t in the audience—it’s in the act. The writing itself is the experiment, the laboratory where I test the reactions of words, images, and thoughts.
You see, my mind rarely rests. It spins, flashes, leaps from one idea to the next with the speed and chaos of a chalkboard equation written faster than it can be solved. Writing slows it down. It pins a thought to the page before it combusts into a dozen new ones. It offers a strange kind of stillness, not silence exactly, but order—the same way a library hums with quiet chaos, each book shouting in whispers.
So here I am, back at the beginning. Back in the same classroom, though I like to imagine the handwriting has improved, the arguments grown sharper, the metaphors a little less overwrought. Whether anyone reads this or not, I’ll be here, scribbling away.
Until then—thank you for wandering into this corner of the archive.
-AS
