write all the things

As I self-reflect on my writing process, its significance and impact on my life start to become more apparent. But writing, or at least the version of it I take for granted today, wasn’t always easy. The mediums and implements I use are leaps and bounds beyond what a younger me would have imagined, yet the feelings evoked remain the same.

This article is spurred by the many iterations of my “portfolio website”: how much it has changed, not only in its purpose, design and presentation, but also in how it has changed me and my way of self-expression.

where it all started#

Writing is a skill we start to develop in our first year on earth, taking about 10 years to become proficient. This tracks with my own experience: I fondly remember being awarded a “pen licence” (a classic Australian tradition) in the fourth grade, a milestone in my life to formally acknowledge my writing proficiency and vest upon me the power to wield a BIC 4-colour retractable ballpoint pen.

During my final year at school, our English exam was administered in a two-hour block where students were expected to handwrite 1,000-1,200 words. I still remember the flailing hands with wrists clenched.

In the subsequent two years, I had already abandoned regular use of a pen, with the computer keyboard taking its place.

My earliest memory of writing prose with a computer goes back to 1999. There was a small, dimly lit room wedged between classrooms in my suburban public school, where a shared computer could be accessed. The teachers would encourage students to book time to “surf the web” and “learn Microsoft Word”.

Computers were expensive; not every family had one. If you did, using it as a kid was under the supervision of an adult. Having access to the internet was not common at all. Our household didn’t have the internet for a very long time - dial-up came to our house whilst I was midway through high school, and by the time we finally got a faster connection, I had already become accustomed to picking up the landline to hear whirs and beeps.

I did play games on the computer (I was occasionally allowed to play a side-scroller like Aladdin on DOS), but if my parents brought home a game, it was almost always an educational one.

Coming back to the classroom, a friend called Lewis and I were both really into computers, especially computer games. Remember those educational games? One of the ones released in the ’90s (Marble Drop) was really fun. Our computer studies teacher used it as a carrot to motivate us to finish our “main computer work”.

An application Lewis and I started to have some fun with was Microsoft FrontPage, a relic from a time when making websites was all about having an editor that mimicked what the website actually looked like (What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIWYG).

Being the gamers we were, our big project for that year involved making a gaming e-zine, a FrontPage-built website with lots of Nintendo characters and game reviews.

And so… I wrote my first-ever “gaming article”. Not because it was homework or because someone told me to.

Because I wanted to.

The game I reviewed was Super Mario 64, and I probably gave it 5 Power Stars out of 5.

There’s a reason I recall this so fondly: writing about something I’m passionate about felt good.

It still does, and it brings me joy.

find your muse#

I once asked my grandfather (Dede) what reading and writing meant to him.

He told me about how his schooling ended at age 13. He was a good student and wanted to continue; however, like many children growing up in the Middle East in the late ’40s, his circumstances dictated that he drop out and start working. He never expressed regret or bitterness, but his passion for reading and writing would shine when he smiled from his heart talking about his favourite books (he would also get really upset when a friend borrowed one of his books and didn’t return it).

In his later years, he would spend hours upon hours writing about everything in his life: long-form handwritten scribbles in our native tongue (Armenian). Private, philosophical, and a rare insight into a slice of history.

There are many stories like my grandfather’s out there, too many to count, and whilst the clichéd proverb “the pen is mightier than the sword” might bubble up, in a way the pen became my grandfather’s sword. It was by his side, making him feel safe through the trials and tribulations of being the primary breadwinner at 13 years old. It supported him through his conscription years, gave him security through marriage, having children, emigrating and having grandchildren, and finally, it was his familiar comfort before his rest.

just be yourself#

I spent fifteen years in tech sales. If I were to average two slide-deck presentations across thirty-two working weeks a year, I would be nearing 960 presentations. Needless to say, that’s a long history of presenting and talking to an audience.

It was dry, repetitive, professional and ultimately cookie-cutter.

As confident as I am at “synergising” and “circling back”, if I were to drop my guard and show my true colours, a very different side of me would emerge: the nerdy, passionate and tangential me - a side that, when I sheepishly put out there, didn’t resonate with many (at least not in the settings or circles I tried).

It’s tiring. I still sometimes catch myself putting on a face. Part of it is the fear of rejection; sometimes I’m just trying to fit in; most of the time it’s feeling misunderstood.

Don’t get me wrong: a genuine interest in others is a wonderful thing, and I wholeheartedly embrace a passionate conversation, yet I often find myself in that odd spot of being hesitant - whether it’s because of the vulnerable position I’m put in by being the real me, or the internal monologue that comes with realising the planet, can sometimes be a lonely place when you have niche interests.

Hesitation holds back progress.

It took fifteen years and close to a thousand PowerPoint presentations to get to a point where I could easily throw slides together fifteen minutes before a meeting and present (not joking – it happened many times). Why shouldn’t I put the same amount of effort into something far more important?

So that’s what I’ve been slowly chipping away at: talking about myself in an honest way and writing about the things I find interesting, with every small step more decisive than the last.

My portfolio attempts have been a mirror of this journey of sorts – take a moment to reflect with me, if you please.

In my very first portfolio design, the corporate me was still very much the “identity”. It’s a story for another time, but I was at a critical junction in life. There was change in the air, but the hesitant me still hadn’t fully embraced my inner voice. I also saw a portfolio as a “means to a job” and hadn’t explored many other avenues.

Around the same time, I had started looking for my tribe. Online communities have always been a big part of my life – gaming, forums and chat rooms all have long threads running back to my early years. It’s interesting to look back at this: I was starting to discover tech interest groups through an online messaging app called Discord, and it looks like the inner me wanted to display some of the joy in finding common interest groups. The language is still very much corporate-coded.

By the next attempt, I was starting to feel a little more comfortable with myself. I had now been part of these online communities for nearly a year, and the idea that more people like me exist in the world brought me comfort. I started attending local meetups (free pizza and drinks – what’s not to like?), and that kid who made a website with Lewis was back. Windows XP took up a massive chunk of my life, and this was a homage to that kid.

Whilst the homage is still up as a demo, something interesting started to emerge.

That feeling of writing because it feels good started to bubble back up. I started to hear my own voice, and I wanted to make sure it was mine.

Furious editing followed – going over points repeatedly, saying things out loud – and the biggest realisation came through this process: this is my website.

It’s my corner of the internet, and I don’t need to hide. If that means super-long articles about colour science, or about how I looked into some weird McDonald’s Flash game from the ’90s, so be it.

I’ve found a calming quality in being decisive. It takes practice and sometimes a bit of courage. My current portfolio is special to me. Yes, it looks nice, but it’s also a nod to how far I’ve come, both technically and personally, in the last two years.

But I also built it for others to use. I made it a platform in the hope that other technical people would have a medium to share their true voices and join me in practising. It’s called Melan, which in Western Armenian means both “ink” and “pen”, and it’s dedicated to my grandfather, who often wrote with his melan in a corner of the room before blogging was even a thing.

fun side note#

As a fun side note on the topic of pens and swords:

There are no sovereign countries that feature a pen or writing implement on their national flag.

Seven sovereign countries (Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Oman, Guatemala, Angola, Iran and Malta) have decided the sword is mightier than the pen. Flags (and I use the term loosely) tied to physical places that feature pens or writing implements are extremely rare – the two I managed to find were:

• The Armenian coat of arms (coincidental, I promise).
• Juana Díaz (municipality of Puerto Rico)