I started writing 10 years ago
Sophomore year of college, I started a blog.
It was the year after a summer I spent interning in Chicago.
That summer was the first time that I was completely on my own.
Up until that point, I was either a child in my parent’s home or a student in school. Even my freshman year of college felt structured and secure, like the path was laid out ahead of me and all I had to do was keep taking the next step.
I rented an apartment in Rogers Park (near Loyola University) and rode the L each morning down to my internship in the Merchandise Mart. My room in the apartment had an air mattress, two pairs of shoes, three shirts, and a stack of books.
On the surface, everything went according to plan that summer. I completed my internship and returned to campus the following year.
But in my mind, everything had changed.
My priorities shifted. I realized I didn’t want the “dream job” that was motivating me to work so hard in school. Freshman year, my GPA was 3.97 (all As except for one A minus). Sophomore year, my GPA was 2.4.
I skipped class to write.
The 13th floor of the library was the philosophy section. My favorite desk was in front of a window, surrounded by shelves of books. On the desk, someone had written in permanent marker, “Ships are safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are for.”
Even when I went to class, I pretended to take notes on my laptop, but I was mostly writing about topics unrelated to the lecture.
I had all these new ideas.
It’s not like I logically knew that writing was the way to process these ideas.
It kinda just started to come out of me. Or it felt intuitively like the thing to do.
Maybe I was talking to people and it occurred to me that I should write down the things I was saying.
Or it was just a result of what I had learned in school. Writing was the way to complete assignments and my mind processed the new ideas as “assignments.”
In hindsight, I think there was a void that opened up when I started to challenge my preconceived notions. Some of these notions were foundational, like the base of a tower of blocks. As I removed each base, another tower toppled, leaving more open space in my worldview.
Writing was a way for me to process the deconstruction of my mental framework.
Sometimes the writing itself was the destructive force. For example, I remember writing about how the 2008 financial crisis bankrupted my dad’s home-building business and forced us to foreclose on our family home. I thought that experience was my motivation for studying finance in college. After writing about it, I realized there were some inconsistencies in my thought process.
In other cases, writing helped me rebuild my mental towers. I started from first principles and worked my way up, organizing my thoughts as words.
Eventually, I started a blog. The URL was colejfeldman.com. Unfortunately, it’s no longer up and running. I stopped paying the hosting bill at some point. I did save one of the blog posts and re-posted it here. It’s about early retirement. It was the most-viewed post on the blog and stirred up some debate among my classmates in the business school.
Since that original blog, I’ve written millions of words and thousands of posts for various other blogs and websites. For this newsletter alone, I’ve written 257 posts. I’ve also published seven books.
Lately, I’ve been brainstorming about how writing can be a service.
Studies show that writing can be an effective form of therapy for various medical conditions. I’ve been especially interested in how writing can improve mental health.
I’ve also been testing the limits of what we consider to be writing.
For example, I believe conversation is writing. You can even write by having a conversation with yourself, recording what you say, and using transcription to turn the audio into words.
And I’ve been exploring a connection between writing and spirituality.
Especially when I write poetry, I find there is a mindfulness aspect of first becoming aware of what information is flowing into your senses before you proceed to translate that sensory information into words.
As I’m currently on my second sabbatical, I think one of these areas can turn into a project that can support me for full-time work, but I don’t want to proceed too quickly to the business aspect.
My intuition tells me there are various ways we can use writing as a beneficial tool for our, health, productivity, well-being, and enlightenment.
Amen, I view writing as no more than asynchronous conversation. Trust your gut and write on, Cole.