Federico García Lorca

My mother loved to foster my creativity. As a young kid, my mom stayed at home with my sister and I. And she would spend time with us helping us to channel our energy into coloring and journaling and reading. She taught me languages before I even reached grade school. French took. Arabic was a bit more complicated (spoken - great, written - lots of crying and frustration).

My father allowed me to harness creativity early on and even later in my early adulthood in fewer ways, but when it came time to start thinking seriously about my future he actively sought to shut it down every time I tried to pursue it. He would worry my mother was doing too much to nurture my dreams and to provide me with hope for a future in the humanities or arts.

My father was more pragmatic. He had a rough upbringing, having grown up quite poor in Egypt. He never told me directly (he never talked about his childhood) but my mother knew this from his siblings and family. A civil engineer by training, he was highly analytical and wanted to use a practical and vocational education to climb out of poverty and seek opportunity away from Egypt, where there was little available for someone of his background (and from any background for that matter). In this way, he was successful.

But the story isn't quite that simple. My father was also extremely creative. He was an art photographer, a furniture maker, and a home renovator/handyman. In my early childhood, we had a darkroom at home. The photos he took of my mother, sister, and I are perhaps some of the most stunning family photos I've ever seen. He saw it as an outlet and when he had any spare time, he would try to pursue his creativity.

As I entered my teenage years, his creativity started to wane and with it mine. I was still very active in music and theater, but writing and reading had fallen away as I pursued a social life. Theater was my primary creative outlet. And I was quite good at it, starring in almost every play I was in, in a public school district known nationally for its arts programs. And therein lied the problem.

My father expressed criticism of my creative pursuits and was worried about where I was headed. He knew I was talented, resilient, and obsessive with my creativity. And with the criticism came the unwavering desire to "steer" us down the right path. He knew that creativity was important as an outlet, but he also believed that it should ever only remain an outlet and only a minor distraction from the grander pursuit of survival and perhaps wealth. He wanted both my sister and I to stand on our own two feet. And while he very directly explained to us that he would never support us financially if we decided to pursue something creative (I don't believe this to be true), it scared us enough to not go down the creative path. Even though I was sure I could be successful, because I was both creative and rationally-minded, this belief in myself did nothing to address my own fear of failing, which, like most kids of immigrant parents, is something I lived with from a young age. The overt lack of support, even if untrue, was enough to instill doubt in my own abilities.

As an adult, I've sought out creative outlets and have done much to nurture them. In doing so, I've learned that perhaps not pursuing creativity as a career allowed me to tap deeper into creativity without the looming fear of failure and without money being a motivating factor, a measure of success, or a means of survival. Paying for my artistic pursuits with my day job allows me to take more risks and to be bolder in my engagements with my creative mind, because I do it purely out of passion and a need to express myself. I may not have the peak creative mind or the energy I might've had in my 20s, but I am uninhibited in other ways. I have nothing to prove to anyone and that opens my mind up to a world I might not have had access to...

Or perhaps this is just what I tell myself to feel better for not having pursued those dreams.

Back in the height of the Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal and Tumblr eras (circa 2000-2010), we saw a proliferation of blogs dominate internet content -- high school students, college students, memers, film buffs, artists, new parents, cancer survivors, photographers, emo kids, and curators (ahem Tumblr)...name your niche -- it felt like everyone had a blog. And back then, it seemed like everyone had just enough of an attention span to make the content engaging (sure...debatable) and to keep the blogs going for years.

The content was personal, short-to-long form, quirky, and occasionally fun. Bloggers wrote about their personal experiences, their emerging belief systems, the things they were learning about life and love, the joys and struggles of being an expat (me), the food they were eating and making -- a blog was a chance to stumble upon a person you didn't know who had shared life experiences or experiences wildly different from your own, but from whom you had something to learn about life. I, like many others at the time, befriended other bloggers and had the opportunity to meet several of them in real life. And the connections were instant and real. And this was an era which holds a special place in my heart.

Back then, the internet was a community of strangers, brought together by common interests and intellectual differences, when vitriol was frowned upon, and the opportunity to learn from someone was just that...an opportunity. Nobody shamed each other for poorly-cited or biased data points and nobody discredited someone's opinion on the basis of a different and equally valid (or not) opinion.

Something changed.

I have a lot of thoughts on just when and why it did change, but it did. And we went from people brought together and bound both through our similarities and differences, to an era of ego and punditry and critique. And now it feels like every blog is an assessment or a "hot take" or a severe take down (or unabated worship) of something bigger and "important". The "blogging" sphere seems dominated by political commentators and art critics and data nerds trying to proselytize their readers in order to be acknowledged, respected, admired, and followed. Life became too serious and the world became just a bit more disconnected because of it.

And I feel like I might be seeing some old school blogger types on Paragraph. Perhaps it's escapism or the fact that folks on Paragraph aren't here for the page views and just because it's an opportunity to connect. That's something to be hopeful about.

So for what it's worth, I'm going to give this blog a shot. And by blog, I mean the 2000-2010 version of the blog.

(Header image created in Midjourney and there are some funny little doodles in there that make no sense)