I’ve never been a huge fan of linear thinking – it doesn’t suit how my brain works, and it doesn’t fit my own process of growing and learning. I think in terms of connections and relationships that help breathe new life into (and shed more light onto) previously known things. Because of that, my writing has been stalled for years.

I felt overwhelmed with the thought, “How could I possibly capture all the connecting pieces that feed into this particular idea/situation/experience in a way that would make sense for anyone else when there is just so much that relates back to something else? It’s too much context and background!” I have been stuck thinking that the most respected ways to write for audiences entail neat lines, clear boundaries. They have beginnings, middles, and endings.

“Write a book, or just start with an essay!” Of course I get that impulse, but for years, such options felt too truncated. Too confining. To definitive. (And that’s largely due to my own buying into the cultural, academic, and professional norms that have most informed my life…this project is part of my ongoing attempt to release and let go of those assumptions!)

In short, I got stuck asking, “Where do I even begin?” because, for me, everything is always already in the middle of everything else.

My process of coming to consciousness has been circuitous, circular, repetitive, redundant, and always new. Some things come back around years later only to return again several times over down the road, and at others times, I was already “there” before I even realized it. Even now, I’m still working on and learning through things that I learned years ago.

For the past few years, I have been pondering an appropriate medium for presenting my thought processes without feeling too restricted by the format. This is the experiment!

Rather than simply writing to define and describe ideas and concepts, I’m hoping that tagging and categorizing them will help facilitate a better understanding of their meaning through relationships and applications to other ideas and concepts.

I also hope that the ability to link to back to other posts from other projects will alleviate some of the pressure I feel to present everything at once. For me, this is, and always will be, a work in progress.

But for you, reader, I hope it will also alleviate any pressure you  may feel to know everything at once. Learning, like writing, is not necessarily best done in a linear fashion. Sometimes we have to go where the flow of our curiosity and comprehension take us. And then keep going from there.