Why I Started This: My Personal Bonfire

Hi everyone! I’m steph, and welcome to my headspace! It is currently 11:40PM now as I am writing this, and I have just taken the plunge to start my own blog. After spending a ridiculous 30 minutes trying to find a decent profile photo and playing with the site’s controls, I found myself staring at a very white, and very empty screen. Then the question finally hit me — what’s the deal of this blog? Why did I bother to start this? What am I going to write about? In all honesty, I don’t know.

However, after giving myself a few moments’ thought, I figured that the issue wasn’t that I was confused on what to write about. Rather, I was confused on how to describe what I was writing. The stuff that I want to write about is nothing. And everything.

Why is it nothing? Well, because it really is. The things that I document here may perhaps appear as unimportant, boring and extra to most people, and maybe even to my future self. In the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually do end up becoming errant, somewhat foolish thoughts on a typical day. In that sense, I’m pretty convinced that ‘nothing’ is a fairly accurate term for the things I write about here.

On the other hand, I’m also trying to talk about everything — things I’m passionate about (e.g. music, travelling, reading, cinema), my past as a straight-A student (I’m not bragging, it made me so miserable), my present uni life, my future….etc. There are simply so many stories that I want to talk about and thoughts that I want to air before I forget or worse, disregard as insignificant fractals of the past. And ironically, I can’t think of a better word to encapsulate the topics I want to talk about than the antonym of ‘nothing’ — ‘everything’. So yes, this blog is simultaneously ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’.

If that’s the case, what’s the meaning of writing about ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’?

I’ve watched a lot of teenage movies where the protagonists gather around a bonfire on a beach and gaze at the flickering flames. In those scenes, everyone always seems lost in the moment — be it in the moment’s spontaneity, in its strange sense of deja vu, in its drunken craziness, in its sudden rush of joy, you name it. However, whatever sentiment the moment propagates, the fact still remains that the bonfire had an otherworldly, flawless beauty as it burned, regardless of its inevitable fate of becoming ashes and dust.

I suppose this blog is, in a way, my personal bonfire. My blogs might amount to nothing more than ashes, in that I don’t expect to emerge any wiser or gain anything after writing my thoughts, experiences and ideas down. That being said, one point will always remain true — during those precious moments when I sit down and record them here, those thoughts, experiences and ideas were everything to me at that particular, beautiful instance.

I still don’t have a clear agenda as to what I will write here, but I do intend to keep my own personal bonfire burning — the flames give a mesmerizing glow.