The Second Iteration

This is actually the second blog that I will be keeping on a fairly regular basis. What makes this blog different from the my old one is, I guess, pretty much what I write and how I will write. I have always tended to write in a way that somewhat glossed over or sugarcoated whatever I wrote about, in a way trying to fit the material into a kind of mold with the goal of "looking good" as a blog post. Alice, my TAS mom, once said:

The danger with the online blog is that there is a tendency to package yourself into something -well packageable, and at the same time interesting. The goal is for people to see you for "who you are."

I suppose this is a tendency when maintaining any blog. It is very easy to end up trying to create some sort of idealized image and write according to that image and actually writing what is actually on your mind.

For what I write here, I will write in a way that is more true to myself. This does not mean that I will not at all frame what I write in a certain way but that what I write will be more true to my thoughts and just basically less sugarcoated or "modified."

Now, about the name of this blog. I decided to call this blog Second Iteration because a lot of I will write here will be reflective, reflections upon experiences, observations, accomplishments, mistakes; reflections upon emotion, thought, faith. Since the start of my first semester here at Yale about three or four months ago, I have learned more about myself as a person than I have through much of high school. I have become more aware of my personal attributes, my potential, and also more of my weaknesses and shortcomings, and at the same time, I am getting a clearer picture of what and how I should improve myself as a person. Though I have found that I have definitely changed a lot in the past four months, I know that I still have a very long way to go. This blog will, in a way, be a chronicle of my growth, in my faith and spirituality and in myself as a person.