On the 6th of June 2017, I started this blog. It was the Tuesday after the general election and I started out writing a Facebook post about what I thought were the causes of a general election result I did not predict but wanted to understand.
Wanting to understand is my first reason for writing anything.
When the piece came to over 3,000 words Facebook would not take it. So a friend of mine who worked at the office where I worked put up a ready to wear blog space for me to put it on.
That day Daphne Caruana Galizia had seen that post. She said it was “exactly what I planned to write, but now there is no need”.
No one was waiting for my assessment of the general election result. Everyone was waiting for hers. Myself included. Her blog is where I went almost every day to try to understand what I could not figure out.
But the way she linked my very first blog post under the headline “This is why the Nationalist Party lost the general election” meant that within 24 hours that article would be read more than 57,000 times.
I liked that.
So I kept up the writing four or five times a week after work. Trying to understand. Enjoying the fact that others took the time to read it.
A few months later I left the office early and went home to try to figure out what had just happened. The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia I could not — cannot — accept, cannot understand, cannot explain.
But due to her inspiring example, her professional generosity, the sheer force of her will, and the grace of her natural talent I decided, in the midst of all the confusion of that day, that something was clear enough. I would not go back to the office to sell software. I would stay at home and write.
In these two years, I published 2,436 articles or posts. Seven hundred and nineteen of them have been translated to Maltese by friends of mine, mostly just the one friend.
Not all of them were good. Most weren’t. Rarely I look back at what I wrote and when I do I’m rarely happy with the quality of it. But when I do read back at things I wrote over the past two years I always remember what I was thinking and what I was feeling when I was writing them.
It’s easy because it’s all written there. Blogging like this, without much regard to what people might think about it, is liberating. It’s the opposite of writing articles for politics, say, or for marketing and advertising where the words you choose are not about the feelings and thoughts of the writer but of what the writer hopes the words will evoke in the reader.
I am, thankfully, free of that. The fact that people read this blog anyway and come back for more is, of course, a great bonus.
I don’t have the monopoly on the truth. And I know more than most that I’m often wrong and never objective. But this is my bias. This is the truth as I’ve discovered it, as I know it and I understand it, mistakes and all. It is the truth as I must tell it.
Thank you for commenting, for sending in guest posts, for sharing these pieces and adding your bit. Thank you for bearing with the Google ads without much complaint and for supporting or donating towards the costs of doing this.
Thank you for still being here two years and 2,436 posts later while I try to understand.