Creating a blog for the first time, after I had created and destroyed it many times in my head.

I found a story I had written when I was 9 years old. It was on two pieces of Hilton Singapore writing paper sandwiched in a Spiderman 2-themed plastic folder. The story was from the perspective of a caterpillar I caught in the attached park where I stayed.

Unfortunately, the same caterpillar did eventually escape a couple of days later, and I never saw it again. What did not leave me however was the desire to create more stories.

In school, I enjoyed writing story-based essays the most. There were times when I secretly prided myself as unique because I would occasionally write essays from the perspective of birds or bears for class assignments when everyone else wrote them as humans.

At 11 years old I was handed a Nokia E51, used previously by my father. I would use my toy figures as characters in a movie, chopping together sequences with the pause button of the video recording interface. Who knew that "Buck" from Ice Age 3 would be the genesis of my interest in videography?

I also grew up closely with two cousins who were the same age as my brother and me. We played the video game Halo nearly every week on an Xbox when we visited my grandparents on my father's side. In secondary school, we were suddenly obsessed with creating short first-person videos of the horror and action genre. We would run around my grandparents' house, phone in one hand and a Nerf gun in another, pretending we were hunted by zombies. My grandfather was unwittingly always the big villain.

Those videos soon became a part of something larger. We scripted an entire zombie-based movie, filming action scenes with a random assortment of camera gear, Nerf gun blasters, Halloween masks, and wardrobe props. What we ended up creating was a 35-minute movie (that took us a long 4 years) full of unintentionally comedic "horror", endless Halo references, movie plagiarisms, and questionable acting.

I still look back at that movie poignantly. My video production skills have leapfrogged, yet I never made another movie since. Growing older came with a practical mind aversed to the spontaneous. My cousins had diverging interests. Studying for exams, going for National Service, and planning for the future took over.

I stopped taking pictures or videos for fun. My writing was also relegated to university essays or the occasional journaling. It was not long before ideas became merely ephemeral concepts, partially formed and swiftly tossed into the junkyard of my mind.

Podcasts I spent more time researching podcasting platforms, microphones, and modes of delivery than recording myself.

Blogs I spent more time finding the writing tone and website provider than actually writing anything substantial.

YouTube channels of different genres and subjects I spent hours ruminating and discarding. A channel about my personal life? Too simple. A technology channel? Too meaningless. A channel integrating my personal life with elements of technology and filmmaking? Too complex. A faith-based documentary channel? Too idealistic.

If you're a friend who knows some or all of these ideas, I hope you know that I appreciate you very much for being a significant person in my life. I also would like to apologise knowing that you probably entertained and encouraged my ideas with much zeal, only to see me fruitlessly move on.

This first post is a bit of a love letter to the moments in my life when I felt no hesitation or ashamedness in creating and doing what I love. Almost like the unashamed moments of Adam and Eve in Eden before they discovered what was good or evil in Genesis.

This first post is also a love letter to new and old friends who have supported me and encouraged me year after year, even when I pushed those ideas away eventually. Because even as I am typing this, my mind waddles into the lake of doubt. Is this platform really the best way to write things like this? Who cares about what I write? Do I sound like a narcissist? What is the point of writing?

At the center of the lake is the scariest thought of all: would I even keep writing after this?

But perhaps I am to be more like the child who wrote that story above, to be more like the caterpillar in that story. Simple-minded. Moving carefreely from one thing to the next. To let events and stories unfold as they are.

And maybe one day I'll escape the box I am in, hopefully growing into the form of something more.

So thank you for being the friends and family that this story is being told. You are the ones that make stories worth telling at all.