I'm not exactly sure what to do with this blog anymore. Reading over what I've written these past nine years with the comfortable vantage of hindsight, I know most of it is really bad. Not just bad writing, though that too is true, but bad logic, impure reason, and adolescent emotionality. Plenty of hubris, too.
When I was young, people had a habit of pointing out how smart I was, and I had the bad habit of believing them. I thought that they were in a position to make that judgement. They thought I had the answers to a lot of things, that if someone was confident and used big words they probably had a keen grasp on the truth.
I didn't really. I mean, it wasn't bluff or bluster - I legitimately believed I was being really clever most of the time. I thought I was using those big words correctly. I made the mistake of believing I'd read enough and seen enough to draw sensible conclusions.
I guess a lot of what I was doing was practice for the sort of person I hope to one day become. I'm still engaged in that practice, and perhaps the most kind thing I can say of the past preceding me is that I was on the right course in pursuing knowledge, but hadn't the skill necessary to recognize certain vital flaws in the way I went about Knowing. I needed more practice.
What I'm saying is that all the stupidity and misunderstanding that comes along with learning is an unfortunate necessity. No-one ever arrives at a point of expertise fully formed. They get roughly better at a thing each time they attempt it, until eventually they look back and are astonished, unable to see any clear sequence between where they began and where they ended up. The change is so utterly complete.
I don't want people to read my work and think it holds all the right answers, not as it is now and certainly not as it was when I began this blog. I could simply delete the imperfect, or revise it - but that threatens a second mistake: it would hide from others that practice is necessary, and hide from myself that my early ideas may not be motivated by such ironclad reasoning as I remember in shorthand.
I would keep this blog to shame me, and recognize that what I really needed when I was a kid was for people to tell me all the ways I was wrong, to insist I validate my smartness with rules that met not their standards, but a fixed, external standard smarter than they themselves were.
