Introduction

Before now I’ve read countless introductions to blogs where the first sentence tells the reader that they’ve been rewriting the aforementioned sentence for hours on end because they just can’t quite figure out an appropriate combination of words that will hopefully pave the way for hundreds of thousands more and for the rest of their blog. I suppose I always judged the cliché of beginning a piece of writing by simply saying that you don’t know what to write, but it wasn’t until I started this post that I realised it's essentially either that or nothing. There’s no real in-between. So this is me, trying my absolute hardest to write my first ever blog post without outright saying that I have not a solitary idea of what to write. The only real difference with me is that it’s not so much been a few hours of redrafting, but more like ten months. After nearly a year of overthinking this God forsaken introduction in my head, I’m finally writing it, and I’m finally going to post it. And I’m scared shitless.

Simplicity isn’t something that comes particularly easily to me, but to (try to) put it simply; hi, I’m Olly, I’m a 17-year-old boy from the south of England and I’m a damn good procrastinator. At the moment I’m in my second year of college studying English Literature, Biology and Psychology and I also work part-time as a Barista in a coffee shop. A little while ago I applied to study English at university with the intention of it possibly leading me to a post-graduate journalism course and then, fingers crossed, employment. It wasn’t until I began the arduous task of weaving together my sparse lifetime merits into my personal statement that it dawned on me that whilst writing is a true love of mine, I have no evidence of it, so this is where a blog comes into it.


I’ve wanted to start blogging since March 2013, but I got so bogged down in the aesthetics of the blog and overwhelmed by the terminology that everyone on this website seems to have an inherent knowledge of that I became too scared to ever write something and ended up repressing my short-lived memories of Blogspot along with my shudder-inducing embarrassing secondary school experiences and the memories of my Tumblr account circa 2011 (both were incredibly dark times). The new year finally gave me enough motivation to throw myself in at the deep end and bite the bullet that I’d been putting off biting for months, and so a few days ago I dusted off this account, recreated a nice, simple blog and well, here I am, I guess.

I’m still not 100% certain of the intricacies of running a blog, but I know that in your mind you should have an idea of the category, theme or genre you’ll write to, and I envy people whose blogs can be easily defined. I think I’m going to settle with the euphemistic title of ‘lifestyle’; I want this to not only be an erratic extension of my inner monologue, but somewhat of a documentation of the misadventures I have in life as a result of my general incompetence, of which, to my dismay, there are many. Consider it a ‘how not to style your life’ blog.

I think that’s everything. I hope that’s everything. I don’t think I can bring myself to write anymore today. I just want to say, to anyone who read the whole post, thank you, it honestly means so much to me to finally have my writing read and I really hope that some of you will stick around for my next post.

Olly