Taking Up Space
Welcome to my website! A year ago, I never thought those words would come out of me, but here we are. The confluence of COVID, leaving consulting, and newfound work / life balance has given me the time and space to be more creative and reflect more about what drives me and what I want to spend more time doing (and the time and space to pick up the ukulele - what a year!). I’ve wanted to make a website for myself for the past 6ish months, but then I fell into a flurry of moving across the country, starting a new job, starting a company (so I guess two new jobs), and falling into this standardized testing rabbit hole. This is not a flex of any sort. While rewarding, these past 6ish months have been replete with ups and downs and just flat-out hard at times. But I digress.
New beginnings :-)
I wanted to make a website, but being a Millennial means I have a weird relationship with the internet. Or maybe it’s just me and I shouldn’t lean on this Millennial crutch. While I used AIM in middle school (@diaary1122 hmu), I’m also still trying to figure out how everyone’s Instagram Stories look professionally made. I worried and wondered how much information to share publicly, what “voice” I wanted to have, and whether someone would use my pictures to catfish people on a dating app. Ultimately, the desire to create outweighed those concerns.
As a good ex-consultant, I am ending with two reasons why I wanted to make this website (I guess if I was a great consultant I would have a third reason):
Building and maintaining relationships: I’ve been really lucky to have lived in so many cities, held multiple internships / jobs, and met so many incredible people. But moving and starting over can be hard, partially because it means saying goodbye to so many incredible people semi-regularly. It’s not just in the past three years that I’ve felt this way. I will unabashedly say I had a blast in high school and growing up in the Midwest, and I wish I was better at maintaining those relationships as well. Part of the intent in starting this website is to keep people up to date with what’s happening in my life and engage with people from my past and present (and future?). If you’re ever reading this and even kind of, sort of, vaguely think about reaching out, please do it! It’ll be fun, and we all need some change to spice up the COVID monotony these days.
Taking up space: There are a million ways to reach people these days and that number is only increasing. I’m not one of those people who’s most responsive on email or text or call or xyz app. I’m on my phone more than I’d like, so I’m equally responsive on all of those. It feels like a little piece of me is in each of these millions places, but I wanted to carve out a specific part of the internet just for myself. I wanted to take up space. It might feel like I’m shouting into a void, but at least it’ll be a void I created. There’s so much information on the internet about all of us that we can’t always control, so it’s nice to have at least one place where I have ownership over my brand, voice, persona, image, what have you.
I’m excited to launch this website, and I’m sure there will be a lot of tweaking and twists and turns as I figure things out. For now, I hope it feels homey and intimate, like a conversation among friends in a living room (ha ha remember when we could do that?).