Long Road to Build a Blog: Six Years

Building a blog isn’t rocket science, and this one is not very complex, so why has it taken so long? Well, mental health and I aren’t exactly friends.

From procrastination and perfectionism to battling anxiety and self-doubt, my brain and I have been at odds over this whole website thing. My ADHD-fueled desire for constant reinvention certainly hasn’t made it any easier.

Then you’ve got all of hustle culture out there shouting, “Just DO IT! Follow your dreams!” While I’m sure that works for some, my brain instead hears, “You’re lazy and dumb. Do something.”

Maybe you resonate with this, or you might not. That’s perfectly okay. We’re all wired differently, which is what makes the world interesting!

Rollercoaster of Creativity

I dabbled in a bunch of creative stuff as a kid, from writing to art and design. Somewhere between dropping out of high school, military service and my wild partying 20s the spark fizzled out, leading to a significantly less colorful adulthood.

Then in 2014, my wife and I stumbled upon a little Canon camera in a pawn shop. I had zero indications that I could do photography, but my ADHD brain said, “this is your ticket!” Now, armed with a camera in the mountainous wonderland of Colorado, I could be just like the locals and fit in!

I dove into photography headfirst - hiking trips, YouTube videos, editing software, new camera gear… it consumed me. While my Youtube presence wasn’t huge, it gave me a taste for content creation and led to early attempts at starting a blog. At the very least, I enjoyed the creative process.

Breaking Through Mental Health

The creative wave was fun, but creating travel videos and thinking of related blog content became a little challenging during the great lockdown of 2020. Being unable to create the content I liked and battling an identity crisis from untreated mental health problems, I decided to nuke all my content and walk away.

I guess I wasn’t alone, because forcing everyone to stay home wrecked everyone else’s mental state too. We all collectively started confronting hard truths about ourselves, and discussions on mental health became more mainstream. After years of denying my own diagnoses and downplaying their impacts, seeing my own struggles in others made something click.

ADHD is just a label Big Pharma made up to sell drugs to children, isn't it?

~Adults I Grew Up Around

I really began to dig into ADHD and other similar health issues, and it was like a missing piece fell into place. I wasn’t just bad at being a person - my brain legitimately worked differently. I was playing a game built for someone else. Being outside the system, not broken, I realized I didn’t have to hate myself anymore.

This was the wake-up call I needed. There were many things I wished I could have heard growing up, and this realization made me want to write again.

A Fresh Start

This new perspective changed my writing goals, but only slightly. I bounced back and forth between serious and wacky branding, as those are the only two wavelengths my brain runs on. Eventually I settled on the only language I knew, sarcasm. I’d be a sarcastic astronaut, a sarcastonaut if you will.

Just like a space explorer, I’m going to explore the space we’re all living in. From mental health, to food and travel, to society, people and technology, my hyperactive mind is going to cover it all for you. I mean, the smart “guru” people say I need to pick a topic, but who needs that kind of negativity in life?

This is my canvas to tell my story and my experiences, and maybe there’s something everyone can take away. I mean, you’re still reading this, right?