Six years ago, I opened this account. At the time, I was working hard to someday come to a career as an author. It was for many reasons, mostly because writing was what I perceived myself to be good at. But ultimately, it became too nuanced a job, and I placed far too much pressure on myself to make it something brilliant. I read, and to this day still read so many beautiful and wonderous passages that I will never be able to duplicate.

I quit writing anything other than nonfiction a long time ago. It turns out, as articulate I can be, I am even better at articulating ideas, particularly history ones. I'm now in my last year of completing my undergraduate degree at a liberal-arts college here in Kentucky. I hope to go on to graduate school and eventually become a professor, where I'd like to teach somewhere similar to where I go to school now, where teaching is emphasized over research.

Deciding on a new, better calling has left me some room for movement, however. I write again, from time to time, with no pressure to create, but as I wish. As it should have been all along. I do not write to be dynamic, I write to express. From time to time, I'll probably still post some of my creative endeavors, and will even post an old one today. But I no longer write for anyone else; I simply write for myself.

Still, 6 long years with the same account. It has left much muck behind. I've been slowly trying to clean the old account. Delete poems from when I was 14, get rid of things I no longer find to be so beautiful, so compelling. I suppose I could have left it as a time capsule - a testament of sorts. That is, after all, what the historian in me says is fair. But it is a time capsule of a time I don't particularly want to remember, and that I cannot forget. It is difficult to forget the names and places that have been so fundamental in forging who we are.

So I suppose that is to say, I am still around, and am making an effort to be more so in the coming days. It is more for the man old friends that remain here, than for myself, but friends I have not relegated to the past.

I shall speak more soon.