What kills a blog isn’t silence—it’s the weight of every imagined objection.

I have 401 drafts scattered across Notion and Obsidian, some more than five years old. They sit there because it feels too exhausting to defend unfinished thoughts locked into time’s bedrock.

It feels exhausting to sit and anticipate every counterpoint.

It’s draining to stretch your brain around every edge case.

You can’t just share and grow. Thoughts should flare and flow—sparks catching fire—but instead they get snuffed out by echoes of but what if someone says?

It feels exhausting when your own ideas turn unrecognizable, waterboarded by strangers.

Still, every now and then, the words slip out in smaller corners—Slack threads, DMs—where I don’t overthink the fallout. Recently I wrote a response to a technical question in an iOS Slack. A friend told me it was worth posting more widely. I spun up my blog—again—but never saw it through.

I dm’d him about something unrelated and he nudged me again.

Sorry.

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40 doesn’t mean anything here—just hella. This draft floated off the ocean one morning after two hours of sleep. I’m not changing it. My dad uses numbers as signals, not counts—the meaning comes from his tone, his facial expression, and how they shift the number against what you’d normally expect. He handed that to me when he passed the pen. It stays.