Putting myself out there
In summary.
This is the first time I’m putting any sort of work out there that actually has my name on it. And while making this website I realized something uncomfortable , most people never fully acknowledge how little of themselves they’ve actually exposed to the world. A quote by Rick Rubin sums it up perfectly: “Making art is free. Sharing is the fee.”
Why one must at some point, display.
Every “great” person has left behind bodies of work for others to look at. Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. David Choe. Harland Williams. Writers. Painters. Comics with Netflix specials. Random people with YouTube channels. At some point they all stepped back and let people look. I’m only realizing now how much courage that actually takes. Especially when you are no longer there to explain yourself. The work just exists on its own and someone can open it for 20 seconds and decide whether they think you are talented, average, smart, pretentious, boring or interesting. And weirdly I think I’ve been avoiding that feeling my whole life. I’m making a portfolio website right now and it honestly feels like putting my 12th grade marksheet on the internet. Like here, this is all I’ve done. This is how good or bad I am. This is where I stand compared to others. And that feeling never really brings joy. I’ve never posted myself online before. No Instagram. No posting my face. No posting my life or my drawings or my writing. This is honestly the first time I’m putting anything out there properly with my name attached to it. And I think what scares me is that once something becomes visible, it becomes real. Before that everything stays blurry. You can always hide behind vague answers like “yeah I’ve done a lot of projects” or “I’ve written a lot” or “I’m working on things.” But the moment you actually display the work, the blur disappears. Suddenly your effort becomes countable and people can quietly open a link and decide what they think of you. Maybe that’s why so many people never put anything out there. Because once you do, you lose control over how people see it.
Writing badly on purpose.
I also feel insecure about writing. My grammar is weird, my punctuation sucks and I repeat myself too much. AI could easily rewrite all of this and make me sound cleaner or smarter or more professional, but honestly I don’t really want that anymore. I want to write like a kid. I want to write with spelling mistakes sometimes. I want to say simple obvious things without worrying whether people think it’s deep enough. I want to write in one sitting and hit publish before I have time to become embarrassed by my own thoughts. I don’t want every sentence to sound optimized or written to impress invisible people somewhere on the internet. I just want to write honestly to myself. Not for engagement or a personal brand or to sound intelligent. Just honest. Because living is different from quoting. None of these ideas are new. Someone wiser has probably already written all of this in a far better way. But these thoughts still feel important to me because this is the life I actually lived through. These are not ideas I borrowed from a podcast clip, they are feelings I arrived at naturally by being alive. And I think expression creates clarity. Sometimes you do not fully know what you think until you see it outside yourself. Thought feels foggy inside the mind, but once written down it suddenly becomes something you can look at from a distance. The act of writing is the act of becoming.
This website is not really a portfolio.
I think this website is less of a portfolio and more of an attempt to stop hiding from myself. To clearly define what I’ve done, what my work looks like, what I care about and who I currently am, even if that version is incomplete or awkward or small. There’s something uncomfortable about clearly seeing your own output. Like finally standing under proper lighting after spending years in dim blurry rooms. But maybe growth requires that.
Sharing work feels strangely painful.
Rick Rubin once said something like: “The vulnerability is the fee.” That line stayed with me because the vulnerability really does feel like the price. Even sharing a portfolio link with 6 or 7 people makes me anxious. Meanwhile there are people putting out movies, albums, paintings, books, entire lives. No wonder growth requires visibility. Your work only starts interacting with the world once people can actually see it. An idea can help someone, a sentence can stay with someone, a design can inspire someone to build something better. But none of that happens if the work never leaves your room. And maybe that’s all I’m trying to do right now. I don’t want to build a personal brand or become famous or pretend to be wiser than I am. I just want to become a little more visible, a little more honest and a little more real.
Bonus: How and why I started writing.
Writing became a place to put things.
I think writing became a way to survive my own head a little. For the past few years I’ve had extremely vivid nightmares. The kind that stay with you after waking up. Sometimes I wake up bleeding from my mouth because I clench my teeth so hard in my sleep. Sometimes I do pushups in the middle of the day just to feel something physical in my body because emotionally I feel numb all the time. When I close my eyes I still see flashes and images from dreams , I went to doctors and was prescribed heavy medication to suppress it. Maybe it helped a little. I honestly don’t know. But the dreams left behind a kind of fear that slowly started leaking into normal life. After a point it becomes difficult to explain to people because the imagery feels too strange and too personal to properly describe. After years I told a handful of close people and they were kind about it, but I also realized nobody can really enter someone else’s mind and fully understand what recurring fear feels like when it becomes part of your everyday life. Before this I had written thousands and thousands of words in journals about dreams and anxiety and random thoughts. Recently I deleted almost all of it because it scared me that my words existed somewhere. Locked behind Face ID. Locked behind passwords. And I remember thinking: Why am I so afraid of my words being seen? Maybe because once people can see your thoughts clearly, they can finally define you. They can point at something and say: “oh okay, so this is who you are.” And maybe this entire website is just me trying to stop running from that feeling.
Putting myself out there
Putting myself out there
In summary.
This is the first time I’m putting any sort of work out there that actually has my name on it. And while making this website I realized something uncomfortable , most people never fully acknowledge how little of themselves they’ve actually exposed to the world. A quote by Rick Rubin sums it up perfectly: “Making art is free. Sharing is the fee.”
Why one must at some point, display.
Every “great” person has left behind bodies of work for others to look at. Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. David Choe. Harland Williams. Writers. Painters. Comics with Netflix specials. Random people with YouTube channels. At some point they all stepped back and let people look. I’m only realizing now how much courage that actually takes. Especially when you are no longer there to explain yourself. The work just exists on its own and someone can open it for 20 seconds and decide whether they think you are talented, average, smart, pretentious, boring or interesting. And weirdly I think I’ve been avoiding that feeling my whole life. I’m making a portfolio website right now and it honestly feels like putting my 12th grade marksheet on the internet. Like here, this is all I’ve done. This is how good or bad I am. This is where I stand compared to others. And that feeling never really brings joy. I’ve never posted myself online before. No Instagram. No posting my face. No posting my life or my drawings or my writing. This is honestly the first time I’m putting anything out there properly with my name attached to it. And I think what scares me is that once something becomes visible, it becomes real. Before that everything stays blurry. You can always hide behind vague answers like “yeah I’ve done a lot of projects” or “I’ve written a lot” or “I’m working on things.” But the moment you actually display the work, the blur disappears. Suddenly your effort becomes countable and people can quietly open a link and decide what they think of you. Maybe that’s why so many people never put anything out there. Because once you do, you lose control over how people see it.
Writing badly on purpose.
I also feel insecure about writing. My grammar is weird, my punctuation sucks and I repeat myself too much. AI could easily rewrite all of this and make me sound cleaner or smarter or more professional, but honestly I don’t really want that anymore. I want to write like a kid. I want to write with spelling mistakes sometimes. I want to say simple obvious things without worrying whether people think it’s deep enough. I want to write in one sitting and hit publish before I have time to become embarrassed by my own thoughts. I don’t want every sentence to sound optimized or written to impress invisible people somewhere on the internet. I just want to write honestly to myself. Not for engagement or a personal brand or to sound intelligent. Just honest. Because living is different from quoting. None of these ideas are new. Someone wiser has probably already written all of this in a far better way. But these thoughts still feel important to me because this is the life I actually lived through. These are not ideas I borrowed from a podcast clip, they are feelings I arrived at naturally by being alive. And I think expression creates clarity. Sometimes you do not fully know what you think until you see it outside yourself. Thought feels foggy inside the mind, but once written down it suddenly becomes something you can look at from a distance. The act of writing is the act of becoming.
This website is not really a portfolio.
I think this website is less of a portfolio and more of an attempt to stop hiding from myself. To clearly define what I’ve done, what my work looks like, what I care about and who I currently am, even if that version is incomplete or awkward or small. There’s something uncomfortable about clearly seeing your own output. Like finally standing under proper lighting after spending years in dim blurry rooms. But maybe growth requires that.
Sharing work feels strangely painful.
Rick Rubin once said something like: “The vulnerability is the fee.” That line stayed with me because the vulnerability really does feel like the price. Even sharing a portfolio link with 6 or 7 people makes me anxious. Meanwhile there are people putting out movies, albums, paintings, books, entire lives. No wonder growth requires visibility. Your work only starts interacting with the world once people can actually see it. An idea can help someone, a sentence can stay with someone, a design can inspire someone to build something better. But none of that happens if the work never leaves your room. And maybe that’s all I’m trying to do right now. I don’t want to build a personal brand or become famous or pretend to be wiser than I am. I just want to become a little more visible, a little more honest and a little more real.
Bonus: How and why I started writing.
Writing became a place to put things.
I think writing became a way to survive my own head a little. For the past few years I’ve had extremely vivid nightmares. The kind that stay with you after waking up. Sometimes I wake up bleeding from my mouth because I clench my teeth so hard in my sleep. Sometimes I do pushups in the middle of the day just to feel something physical in my body because emotionally I feel numb all the time. When I close my eyes I still see flashes and images from dreams , I went to doctors and was prescribed heavy medication to suppress it. Maybe it helped a little. I honestly don’t know. But the dreams left behind a kind of fear that slowly started leaking into normal life. After a point it becomes difficult to explain to people because the imagery feels too strange and too personal to properly describe. After years I told a handful of close people and they were kind about it, but I also realized nobody can really enter someone else’s mind and fully understand what recurring fear feels like when it becomes part of your everyday life. Before this I had written thousands and thousands of words in journals about dreams and anxiety and random thoughts. Recently I deleted almost all of it because it scared me that my words existed somewhere. Locked behind Face ID. Locked behind passwords. And I remember thinking: Why am I so afraid of my words being seen? Maybe because once people can see your thoughts clearly, they can finally define you. They can point at something and say: “oh okay, so this is who you are.” And maybe this entire website is just me trying to stop running from that feeling.