Day 744: The Gift of Journaling

Today, I went back and read some of my old Road to Ramen posts, and it was so interesting peering into the day-to-day chronicles of my thoughts and feelings. When I write these posts, I try to write for “present me” — that is, this is a way for me to think out loud and articulate my present moment experience so that it’d be clearer to myself now. I’m also aware that I have an audience of people who read these posts because I occasionally get emails or messages from friends and other readers referencing Road to Ramen or a particular post, but I purposely try to let that awareness fade into the background when I write because I want this to be my cozy corner of the Internet where I can be as authentic, raw, and vulnerable as possible instead of introducing elements of public performance where I’m censoring myself or writing for some imagined audience.

Looking back at my old posts today, I realized that there’s another party to take into account: future me. It’s amazing to know that in the years to come, I can look back on this period of my life and be able to have a sense of the kinds of things I was thinking about, working on, struggling with, delighted by, etc. It’s one thing to have a vague memory about what it was like when I was living in quarantine with my friends in Santa Cruz a year and a half ago and had just come up with the idea for Browserflow; it’s another thing to read posts where I excitedly call it “the idea to end all ideas” and write about working 14-hour days because I’m just so obsessed with the project. Given how different my energy is right now, it honestly feels like reading about another person entirely.

When I made the post about completing the road to ramen, I briefly considered ending this daily journal and only writing more public-facing, polished posts, but today’s little reflection made me deeply appreciate having these raw records of my day-to-day life. That also made me realize that I don’t have to worry about writing a “good” post or if a topic is worth writing about — as long as it’s authentic and real, future me will find it interesting simply because it’s a reflection of my state at the time. I even read through some of the highly-technical posts regarding the early engineering decisions I made for Browserflow and it was so interesting to revisit the problems that felt so gnarly and annoying at the time.

Side note: I’m honestly kind of intimidated by old me reading these posts because the level of enthusiasm and drive I had was honestly unreal. Working 10+ hours a day for 10 straight days? Building the entire product from scratch and coming up with this demo in 2 weeks? What the heck was I on? My product development feels so much slower now compared to then, and while there are valid reasons why that is the case (product is much more complex, can’t break things willy-nilly because there are paying users who depend on their flows, etc.), this is inspiring for me to build up that kind of zeal and fearlessness to dive deep into meaty technical challenges and build cool things. Reading about how I implemented the sharing flow in Browserflow in a single day makes present-me feel like I’m being super lazy in comparison. (Of course, it’s important to recognize that I can’t work at that breakneck pace all the time, but I want to make it a more regular occurrence to have these bouts of hyper-productivity.)

Thank you, past me for sharing openly so that present me can read about what it was like to be you.

Thank you, past me for working so dang hard so that present me can reap the rewards.

Thank you, past me for being you.

I love you!