Hello world.
or rather, the void and friends who *may* get to read it if I ever get over myself.
Okay, here we go. Not sure what we are doing but it starts.
I am undecided, as with most aspects of direction in my life, where to go with this. For now, it is best to define it as a space to unfurl and attempt to structure the inner chaos of my brain.
One element will be recommendations (or things I’ve consumed that I’ve enjoyed in any given day, week or month). As friends will now know well, it’s an almost compulsive habit that I feel confident I can keep up on here on a regular basis.
‘Recommendations’ will, for now, be the only fixed segment of this … ‘blog’. The rest will be decided by the whims and tangential musings of my brain. I would naturally reach for a self-deprecating joke here about how 🤪 chaotic it is — but I refrain, in the spirit of what this space might become.
Shy Opinions comes from something I wrote back in March after returning from Moldova.
I wrote back then that “in this last period of my life I’ve grown much shyer about expressing beliefs here or at all, maybe. Lots of questions for myself like: what am I trying to prove? Where do the opinions go, who do they really touch, what do they really change?”
When I was in primary school, a 9-year-old Bella asked my Prep 3 teacher: “Mrs. Fernett. When will I be able to know everything?” What my little - and let’s all admit precocious - brain was really asking was when do I get to stop doing Jesus homework. But what I think I was trying to grasp then was when would my sense of certainty arrive: when would the world stop spinning and be still so I could have it all figured out.
What I was grasping at writing that back in March, and what I will attempt to grasp here, is that to be unsure is a gift. It opens a room for an understanding, of our lives and the worlds we inhabit, that is so much more precious, interesting and (confusingly) true than any black-and-white, this is true and this is false, picture could ever paint.
Welcome?