Day 277: Writing For Me

writing

I gave a presentation to the team at Kapwing today for their creator speaker series about my experience creating videos on Facebook and going viral back in 2017. (Fun fact: that video still makes the rounds — one of my friends recently sent me a link to a copy on TikTok that got over 3 million views.)

My favorite part about preparing that presentation was reading my old journal entries to understand the way I thought and felt during that time. I almost never revisit my creations (blog posts, journal entries, videos, etc.) after I make them so this was a rare treat. Even though it’s only been three years, the way that I think and approach life has evolved quite a bit so it was helpful to have a written record rather than try to remember what kind of ideas and desires I had floating around in my head.

Here are snippets from some of the journal entries that I referenced during the talk:

One of the reasons why these journal entries are so interesting to look back on is that they’re entirely unfiltered. In it, I wrote about everything — the project I was working on at Google, my personal finances, insecurities, my dating life, you name it. I could write about specific people in my life and name names without worrying about how they’d feel about it if they came across it online since everything was private.

I started Road to Ramen with the desire to be completely transparent, and I’ve taken measures like not including analytics to make sure that this remains raw and authentic rather than performative. But even then, I still know that everything I write will be public, and I’m sure that affects the things I write about. If I were in a difficult situation involving my friends (e.g. imagine my housemates and I had a tiff), I probably wouldn’t write about it here because it’d affect the ongoing situation.

If I want this to be super duper 100% non-GMO raw, I’d be best off writing privately. Buuuuut, I don’t think I want to do that. Or not yet, anyway. Road to Ramen helps me stay in touch with friends, and I like the idea of pushing the boundaries of transparency and authenticity in a public sphere. Much of the content we see nowadays is heavily curated or provide only a snapshot of someone’s life, and this project is meaningful to me because it’s a way to show the reality of having ups and downs in life — not just a highlight reel.

So I don’t want to take this offline, but I also want to make this as real and authentic as I can. One of the changes I’ll make is reframing the way that I think about Road to Ramen. There’s a part of me that has the reader in mind when writing. For example, if I talk about the same thing over several days, I’ll try to change the topic so that people don’t get bored. Personal posts that ramble feel “worse” than ones about a specifc topic because it’s not sharing anything interesting or novel.

Here’s my decision: Road to Ramen will be my personal journal, and that’s it. I’m going to write about whatever’s on my mind, regardless of whether I think people will find it interesting or not. I’m writing purely for myself. This was the approach I started with when creating R2R so nothing has really changed, but I’m recommitting to it and reminding myself of the spirit behind this project. I want this journal to be an accurate representation of my thoughts and experiences that I can look back on years or even decades from now, and it’ll be far better for that if I drop the notion that it’s meant to be read by others.

Whenever I want to write something designed to be shared/read by others, I’ll use the blog section of my personal site.

  • Road to Ramen = writing for myself
  • dkthehuman.com = writing for others