I should be honest—I am developmentally delayed. And I am so grateful for it. Don't get me wrong, there are things that I've been doing my entire life and trying to cultivate skill-wise. (Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that's only writing.)

The rest? Definitely late. I was almost already in middle school by the time I knew how to properly tie my shoes. I was in high school until I was nineteen and in grade 13. I still don't know how to drive. I graduated university at twenty-nine. Despite masking my entire life, there are still things I'm learning that are acceptable vs. unacceptable in social situations. I'm growing my hair out for the first time in my life right now. There are even more embarrassing points I could make which would really hit home how much arrested development imbued in me, but I should save some face, shouldn't I?

There's actually a term for this, or at least the closest academic approximation of it. Emerging Adulthood, a concept coined by developmental psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in a widely-cited 2000 article in American Psychologist. Arnett's idea was that the years between roughly eighteen and twenty-nine have become a distinct life stage of their own. Not quite adolescence and not quite adulthood. There's identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between, and a sprawling sense of possibility. Arnett called it a "roleless role," and I find this both deeply accurate and deeply comforting. I'm just still on the winding road.

Anyways, this blog you're reading on? I made it two months ago, in December 2025. Despite getting into Linux and starting to self-learn web development like Jekyll when I was sixteen, I have only entered the IndieWeb now. Similarly, it's only been in the past few months that I've started using microblogging platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky.

When I say that I'm grateful for being a late bloomer and taking so long to dip my toes into different things, that isn't toxic positivity. I mean it. For example, I can't imagine how detrimental it would have been for my psyche if I joined and actively used Twitter during its existence instead of bypassing it entirely. I've had time to cultivate my values and become steadfast in my identity and who I am.

I am transient and nomadic in my interests and passions for this reason. As soon as I'm competent with something, I typically find myself jumping ship onto something else. I spent a year learning analogue photography and have a few thousand dollars worth of negatives and a storage box full of 4x6 photos. I spent another couple years learning guitar and music theory and released a couple albums on Bandcamp. Really though, life is far too interesting to not try many things. You don't want to end up with no figs, after all.

Even within the interests I have kept over all these years, I find ways to reinvent myself. I've had half a dozen different poetry accounts and identities: b.k. blayze, the Hyacinth Boy, the Pine Draft, and Warsaw Mountain.

Restarting and figuring out how to be a beginner again means I don't have the anxiety and expectations that I ought to know what I'm doing. Mistakes lose their weight. There's no imposter to syndrome. When I'm green and baby-faced, I have permission instead of responsibility. Excitement instead of cynicism. Hope instead of defeat. But this is just a mindset. I bring it to everything I do. I think deeply of the world, and lightly of myself.

It's so much more fun to just do whatever, and do it badly and mess up than it is to be careful and skip over things for the sake of not appearing untalented or unskilled. So what? Who do you really think is paying attention? Better question: who do you think is judging you for being a beginner? Certainly nobody with an opinion you need to take into account.

Because it's about the verb. The action and the doing! It doesn't matter how much you discuss the thing or how much gear you buy, or how even how knowledgeable you are. I think this is the clever distraction and procrastination people often use. We try to pretend planning is the work, and that being careful is good for us. We think the material thing (the thing we can buy or talk about, rather than the action we can take to get our hands messy) is an equal, compatible substitute.

I don't blame people for this, it's so easy to get caught up in the culture of metatalk and consumerism and performance. This is one of the major existential problems I think that Substack has as a platform. To perform the aesthetic of being scholastic instead of pursuing knowledge for the intrinsic value of learning.

Finally, the Blogging and the IndieWeb

Anyways, that's why I'm here. That's why I write so much about so many different things.

When I was in high school, I was so interested in being a blogger. Blogging has been a special interest of mine since my elementary school teacher showed my class Blogspot back in 2008.

And for two or three years, I did heavy research. I dug into the differences between platforms, learned all about search engine optimization and backlinks and funnels.

It took me way too long to realize that what I was learning about was how to create a vehicle for marketing and business, not writing. Not blogging as I understood it. I only learned much later that what I was really trying to find would be more accurately defined as creative nonfiction and personal/lyric essays. I care about good writing, meaningful storytelling and sharing life and building community through that craft. Not adspace or affiliate links or niches or editorial calendars.

That's why, during a lunch break at my job at the hospice, I decided to finally write my first post on Medium. Back then, the platform was angled as being a longform, thoughtful Twitter created by Ev Williams. I really enjoyed the minimalist look and strong typography. But even more than that, I appreciated the total lack of friction there was, the total lack of choices to hem and haw over. There was no room for discourse about design or optimization. Just a place for me to write.

And so that's why I wrote on Medium exclusively for about ten years. Despite the fact I've been making JAMstack blog themes for longer than half of that. To juggle coding, hosting, and designing a personal website on top of the actual act of writing was still so intimidating to me for so long.

Have I missed out by choosing this? I think so, actually. On the IndieWeb, I've already met so many kind people, and there's a community that I haven't really found on the Internet before.

Since I've joined the 32-bit Cafe, I've been reading a lot of discourse about what the IndieWeb is and isn't. And it was, admittedly, a bit of a surprise when I did make my personal site and join the IndieWeb that I saw the disdain for Medium that I did. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm well-aware of how the site has a bad reputation/branding for hollow, shallow writing and Linkedin-esque broetry that's often paywalled to boot. But it is run by good people, and an independent company.

I realize I bring my politics with me wherever I go, and one of my strongest political values is this: big tent! It breaks my heart to see so much infighting and lateral violence within nearly every subculture. (Although, don't get me wrong, I don't think the discussions I've seen regarding the IndieWeb are hostile arguments, far from it.) I see a lot of merit in nearly everything. I try my best to practice benevolence and giving grace to others. I am probably annoyingly pollyanic but it's worked well for me so far.

And that's really the heart of all of this, isn't it? Both the late blooming and the blogging and everything in between. The doing matters more than the discourse about how to do the thing correctly. Showing up late and messy and unprepared is still showing up.

When I eventually learned to tie my shoes, they got tied. When I finally started this website, it got made. The gap between the version of yourself who is still researching and the version who has already started is not filled with better information or more preparation. It's filled with time you spent not doing the thing.

The bigger the tent, the better. The more people who are welcome to just begin the richer all of our lives get. Whether that's blogging on Medium or on their own hand-coded corner of the IndieWeb, whether that's releasing lo-fi Bandcamp albums or picking up a camera for the very first time. You never have to earn the right to start. You just have to start.