To Garden This World from a Wasteland
On rebuilding my personal website as a place for writing, photography, daydreaming, and letting thoughts wander.
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To destroy, and then to reestablish. This is the only principle of moving forward, as in software development, as in personal growth. And this is what I’ve decided to do to this website again, just three weeks after the last round of reestablishment.
The last reestablishment, ridiculous as it seems to me now, was such a quick, purposeful thing. I quickly organized all my things and quickly worked with ChatGPT to put everything on the site, eager to show someone that I had something. The show was a total failure, as it was destined to be from the very beginning.
It was a failure by my own measure, in my own struggle between fawning and freedom. Both begin with “f,” but they have totally different endings. How did I, someone who pursues freedom and has the talent to create things in the virtual world, end up building a fawning room? A room full of things I chose or made or wanted to show someone, hoping they’d be happy to see them and think well of me. My own room, my own space?
I’ve always dreamed of having a garden. A garden, a garden is a place for creativity, for flourishing, for things to grow as they will. As Yiyun Li writes, “Things in nature merely grow.”[1] I can’t have a garden right now. I can build a garden here on the website for myself. This is possible. So how could you call it anything but a failure that I turned the garden I dreamed of into a store selling things from elsewhere?
It feels like a place for everything but me. I forgot my instinct as a writer. By writer, I mean someone who cannot stop writing, rather than someone who writes perfectly. My instinct as a photographer, who takes photos to fight against time and everything passing away, rather than to produce great photos. My instinct as a daydreamer, who dreams up interesting things every minute, rather than valuable ideas. My instinct as a thought wanderer, who connects everything out of curiosity, rather than trying to focus deeply enough on one thing to become famous.
I, unfortunately, left no space for that part of myself on this website. So I can only clumsily and insincerely work with ChatGPT to produce more content until the day I don’t want to produce or pretend anymore. So this is only a store, a job, a dead place.
So I made a decision. To garden this world from a wasteland.
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025). ↩︎