Blank Pages
"are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?"
A few days ago I decided I wanted to start a blog. I looked up the best way to do so, and that led me to buying a website and a domain name, both of which I couldn’t figure out how to use, because despite being a Gen Z, I am not technologically savvy. So after two hours laying in the dark on the couch at the end of the hall in my college dorm trying to figure out why my “domain was failing to launch,” I gave up, and wandered into my friend’s dorm room. I planned to go to dinner with this friend, at a new restaurant I found near campus. It’s part of my “adventure list,” since I’m trying to seize the fact that I live in LA now. Well, change of plans. Her 6 AM bedtime from the night before was starting to set in, and she was no longer energetically charged to go to dinner. By this point, the dining hall meatballs in my stomach were starting to churn, I was frustrated at my stupid non-existent blog, and now I was plan-less. I could tell all of these factors were bringing me to the cliff of an emotional breakdown and internal claustrophobia. I decided to call my dad to complain. In doing so, I realized how petty my complaints were so I started to tell him about my blog troubles instead. He told me about this website called substack. So that’s how I got here. My blog was going to be called Blank Pages. I don’t have a definitive explanation for why. But I do love to journal and I feel that a blank page is a metaphor for something. I’m a sucker for metaphors. A blank page has potential. You can turn it into anything you want. The words you choose to fill it with are entirely up to you. They are entirely yours. A blank page is like a new day. We literally have the power to change our lives with a day. You can do anything you want with a new day. I want to live like a blinking cursor. Or a hovering pen. I don’t want to be stuck on a page from last week, and I don’t want to skip ahead and write my story for next week. I want to be completely and wholly in this moment, writing my story as I go. Right now I’m sitting in my college dorm room, eating popcorn out of the same bowl that was just filled with yogurt. I’m writing my first blog entry. And that is enough. In this moment, this is my story.