It has been more than half a year since this blog went live, and along with some shifts in my life, I made a few adjustments to bring the blog more in line with where I am now and what I want from it.
The most visible change is the new site favicon. Ever since I developed tendinitis in both hands at the end of last year, I haven’t been able to play piano for very long. At its worst, just five minutes of playing would leave my hands stiff and numb, and there was a stretch where seeing my piano would actually make me sad. I don’t make my living from music (does that mean I can still call myself a musician? hmm), but playing piano and making music has always been core to who I am, and I found that identity colliding with my physical limitations like two tectonic plates grinding against each other, the pressure building the whole time.
I decided to take that tag off the homepage first, and off my heart, too, for a while, and focus on other interesting things instead.
After thinking it over, I decided to redo the site’s favicon. I opened the Sketchbook app on my iPad and, in about five seconds, sketched out a pencil doodle,1 originally meaning to go back and add more detail. But when I sat back and looked at it, I suddenly realized the sketch was just too cute as it was: those unintentional, imperfect lines weren’t something AI could replicate, and honestly, I couldn’t draw the exact same thing twice myself either. Maybe you could say the roughness of the lines represents the author of this site speaking loosely and casually, and if that’s the case, I’d ask you, the reader, to read it just as loosely and casually too. lol
Next I rewrote the “About” page. Honestly, “About” might be the hardest page on the entire blog to write. Beyond privacy concerns, it also comes loaded with all kinds of overthinking: if I write about my career, will readers just see me through the lens of that career? If I write about my personality, what if the personality I think I have doesn’t match what readers actually perceive? Should I even bother writing it then? Plenty of fellow bloggers skip the “About” page entirely, and some readers/bloggers, like Tian-Yan, prefer to just read the posts and piece together their own impression of the author from there. Still, even though not every reader will click through to “About,” I really wanted there to be one, since I’m genuinely curious how every writer chooses to describe themselves. To satisfy that little reader living in my head, I mulled it over for ages, until it suddenly hit me: hey, if describing myself directly feels like too much pressure, why not just describe how I think about writing and about this platform instead? Those thoughts are, after all, the meta-reflection behind every post I write, and the whole reason this site exists in the first place. That felt right, so I gave it a major rewrite.
While revising, I also went back through old posts I’d written, and it was oddly fascinating. My writing really has changed, and my voice seems to be slowly finding its own shape. On top of that, a few other little shoots and buds have sprouted too:
learning different ways to express myself;
learning to find deeper meaning in the small, boring stuff;
practicing how to voice my opinions in a public space;
and learning to keep my own inner motivation going without outside feedback (I completely agree with what Marcus says: don’t measure it).
Beyond all that, there’s also been a happy accident: the website VisBible.org.
That site only exists because this blog came first. I’d originally wanted to put the notes I casually make while reading the Bible (image below) up on the blog for others to reference. Without the blog, I probably wouldn’t even have had the idea to share them at all. But there are plenty of people who make images like that, and comparatively few who build whole websites for it, so why not just build a website?
Turns out I had dug myself a huge hole, but I am having so much fun down here.
That’s more or less my reflection after half a year (seven months, technically) of blogging. There have been some adjustments, and some surprises both expected and unexpected. I hope I can keep writing, digging myself out of the ground a little bit more each time.
NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 05/05/26. It was later translated with assistance from AI tools, edited by me, and published in English on 07/15/26.
Huge thanks to Sam, who spent many, many times longer than five seconds tracing that PNG into an SVG vector for me. ↩︎