The days of procrastination and delaying my dreams in life are finally over. And what better time to begin writing again?
The pandemic has been harrowing to our third world country, but I made lemonades out of lemon with the extended lockdowns at home. I was running on the fast lane in the middle of last year after winning the NASA Space Apps Covid-19 challenge and taking on a Chief Marketing Officer role around 2 months after.
Outwardly, I was achieving something beyond what I’ve achieved in previous years. However, it’s hubris to stay in the same place much less dwell in the good things that have been accomplished. Ultimately, I am still responsible for filling in the gaps of self-improvement. There is always something to improve until the day our lives come to an end. People only see that I have accomplished this and that, but in the depths of my soul searching and on those late nights that I ruminate long after the kids have gone asleep, I think about the things I need to work on to make myself a much better person.
Switching From Wordpress to Hugo
It may seem counterintuitive for a technical digital marketer like me to switch to Hugo. For one, the ease of SEO tools are all in popular content management systems like Wordpress. I have used Wordpress from 2010 to 2020 for my basic blogging requirements when I was still blogging at helenmarylabao.com (That site’s been long neglected and delisted from the SERPs, unfortunately.)
Recently, though, it’s my IT and web developer hat that won this battle of choosing my stack for my personal website. I became more obsessed with site latency or speed and the appeal of static site generators and javascript rendered frameworks are lending its charm. There are also customizations I’d like to do in this website (like my portfolio page and the data visualizations) that do not work on the fly with Wordpress. I am also relieved of the bloat removal of having to install a plugin for each requirement, and the fact that all I need to publish a new post is a Markdown file and a git push command on Github.
The Season for Putting It All Together
I have also taken enough time to think of where I’d like to go or what kind of legacy I’d like to leave behind. This was not an overnight exercise. It took me years to get out of the scatterbrained, spinning-on-the-wheel stance where I was constantly caught up in shiny objects and lacking in CLARITY on my approach to things. As it turns out, I have been so good at supporting everyone else’s dreams around me that I seem to have lost sight of my own goals.
While for a good 16 years, that made me a good worker or friend or companion, I was doing it at the expense of my very soul or essence as a unique human being. I am still eager to help people, and I always will be. It’s just that, this time around, I have learned to treat myself with the same love that I give to the ones I care about. I have learned to honor the soul inside this person who likes to hustle day in and day out.
Savoring My Personal Interests
I surely benefit from reading 70-80 books per year for my happiness and introvert fulfillment. I am still a bookworm or voracious reader, but I am no longer forcing my learnings from my reading journey to all be applied in my work projects. Sometimes, I just accepted that I am reading books for the sheer delight of it. I have learned not to turn the things I love personally into a hustle for “productivity” purposes. Nope. These personal interests are essential for my downtime. This is sacred time.
I realized that I need those gaps, those tiny pockets of time where I can just workout or exercise, read a book uninterrupted, or write a blog like this without worrying about the monetary benefits I can get out of it. I will let my actual work projects take care of that part that needs to pay bills, be an adult, and self-actualize professionally. My personal time is part of self-care, and what I do with it does not necessarily have to bring me income.
What This Site is Up To
This site will be a synthesis. It will contain diary entries like this from time to time. It will contain my intellectual journeys with data and creative pursuits. It will contain bits and pieces of my life as a wife and parent of two hyper kids under 5. And it will also, in time, paint a picture of my life’s work ever since I began collecting paychecks for lifestyle articles in 2004. That’s seventeen years of work across multiple industries, and I have not really crafted a special place to digitally put them all together. I did so much content for so many people and businesses, but I haven’t really treated my own personal website as a project that’s worth cracking. That changes this year.