01. Why a blog and how writing helped me understand myself better

Did you know that many years ago I had a blog called "Design Why?" I bought a domain, created a visual identity and, even though I wrote two posts, I felt embarrassed to continue because I thought I didn't know how to write properly. There is still a Facebook community, more as nostalgia than anything else.

This insecurity did not come from nowhere. Even though I was a student who got good grades, I always struggled with grammar and was never very good at essays where we need to put our view of the world into a limited number of lines, structure and time. In fact, I only started to enjoy reading after I was 18, and even today I feel like I haven't read enough books.

But going back to childhood, the lack of references in my family of people who enjoyed reading may have had a strong impact on how I saw myself. Still, after we grow up, it is our responsibility to understand our privileges and learn from other people what we want to change.

Also, during my teenage years, I used MSN, a messaging app that was very popular in Brazil in the early 2000s, and I wrote using many abbreviations. I ended up carrying this habit into other digital spaces, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

When I started taking exams to enter university and later writing emails and reports at work, this habit started to affect my formal writing. Because of that, I put it in my head that I was bad at writing.

But was I?

I am surprised by how much we underestimate ourselves. Sometimes we create beliefs that may not be exactly true. After all, truth can have different interpretations, depending on the point of view. And over time, I learned that when it comes to writing, grammar is not the most important thing. These things can be improved throughout life.

For example, when I was preparing for the university entrance exam, after a lot of effort, my essays started to improve. I was still anxious about time pressure and about demanding perfect writing from myself. But after I fell in love with design and human behavior and later bought a Kindle, my interest in reading grew. This also happened because I spent many hours commuting to university, which gave me plenty of time to read, and this involvement with reading helped me build a richer vocabulary.

I admit that abandoning my blog "Design Why?", a project I started in university, still haunted me. So I began writing technical articles for one of the biggest UX communities on Medium, called UX Collective, and I received many compliments. I realized that I was no longer ashamed of writing, but that my writing was focused only on professional content. When I allowed myself to step outside of that focus, I started to understand that I could write about things beyond that.

On a more personal level, I noticed a pattern. When I had a lot of emotions building up, you could be sure I was the person writing long messages to people I was in relationships with. Even though this habit is seen as something negative by some people, for my emotional regulation I believe it is very powerful. I also realized that this connection with writing influenced the way I tell stories, improved the way I speak, and even helped my imagination work in a more creative way.

As a way to explore this side of myself, I realized I could use writing as a tool for my well-being, and I discovered that therapeutic writing even exists. I bought a notebook and tried to write about my day almost like a diary. But I found it a bit boring, and since I was living abroad and later became a nomad, carrying a notebook became just one more thing. And in this kind of life, the fewer things, the better.

So I realized that I needed some motivation, a way of writing that was not only for myself, but that could also be shared with the world. This inspiration comes largely from the book Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon.

With this inspiration, I realized that it also met another need. You know that desire to have deep conversations with someone? When we write, it feels like we are talking to ourselves in a very intense way. Writing helped me organize my racing thoughts, almost as if I found a way to walk my own path, idea by idea, at my own pace.

The idea here is to write. To write about things I live, question and learn. About how, sometimes, I connect things that are not so obvious. This appears in the trips I take, the people I meet, my mistakes, my idle moments and even in ordinary days, with nothing special happening.

This blog will be my hobby. I don't want to promise frequency, because I don't want to turn this into pressure or performance.

I want to write to think better. To understand myself better. And maybe, in the middle of this process, help someone else recognize themselves too. Because each person is a universe. But even with all our differences, I believe there are connections.

If this makes sense to you, feel free to connect and share your stories. Maybe writing can help you understand yourself better too. And I would love to get to know your view of the world.