Nine attempts at finding the writer inside
from stuttering to staggering - the evolution of a name
to stagger:
to astonish, overwhelm
to move unsteadily, as if about to fall
False starts and school fees
31st July, 2018 - The story of my online writing journey starts with this little nugget in my farewell email for my consulting job:
I've also bought a domain and started writing, something I've promised myself to do for a while! It's still private (and largely empty), but check-in in a couple of months (https://onestutteringmind.com). Beyond this, the story is still unfolding.
Indeed, it is still unfolding. Seven years and nine iterations later, and I'm tallying the costs in this retrospective.
Feel free to skip ahead to the crux of the matter if you'd like.
Iteration 1: WordPress.com - $108
Correction: the story actually starts slightly earlier. On the 14th of June, 2018, I paid $48 for the domain and hosting on WordPress.com, then another $60 to a friend for photos. I published one post about diving into a 10-day meditation retreat without any meditation experience, and then proceeded to not publish anything else.
Iteration 2: WordPress.org - no fees
By July 2019, paying $4 monthly for my single post to have a home on the internet seemed wasteful. So I migrated to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, and published three posts over 18 months. Progress by inches.
Iteration 3: Squarespace - $144
January 2021. My YouTube Logseq tutorials gained traction, reigniting my writing ambitions. I threw everything together—Logseq guides and four previous posts—into Squarespace, a website builder that I had some experience with, to make the process as easy as possible. If I'm honest, it was mainly Logseq "how-to's".
Iteration 4: Ghost - $550 (ouch)
January 2022. Squarespace was up for renewal, but Ghost offered features to help me easily build a subscriber base. I paid $108 ($9/month) and moved everything across. Then I discovered a template I loved for $149. I started a "newsletter", and began sharing more personal posts (more life updates than anything substantial) and gaining subscribers. The additional subscribers pushed my monthly fee to $31. Nearly $300 later, with personal writing getting subsumed by life's demands, I made another change.
Iteration 5: Hugo, self-hosted - no fees
It took hours of technical tinkering and back and forth with ChatGPT to get it working, but at least it worked! I went all in, moving all my websites to Hugo. And here, I stayed put for a while.
Breaking up with my former persona
Iteration 6: From OneStutteringMind.com to personal.combiningminds.org
September 2023. I started feeling OneStutteringMind had the makings of a self-fulfilling prophecy, focusing on the negatives of my ADHD-mind. It implied I would always be stuttering around from one thing to another, not making progress in anything. Plus, random people kept tagging me in stuttering-related content on Twitter. I'd seemingly accidentally positioned myself as some kind of stuttering advocate.
At this crossroads, I published a video announcing a name change to "CombiningMinds"—a more business-appropriate name ahead of what I hoped would be a take-off in my course business and consulting work (sidenote: the runway is longer than expected).
Trying to minimize different areas of focus, my personal writing became relegated to the sub-domain personal.combiningminds.org—essentially a subset of my professional persona.
But that didn't feel right. How could I explore religion, existentialism, and human messiness on a subdomain of a site focused on personal knowledge management and productivity courses?
But wait, why would I want to write about those things in the first place?
What am I not saying?
Dear reader, I must level with you. I've been hiding the truth.
I want to be a writer.
Shit, I said it. Oh well, no going back now.
It feels insane to put it on the page so clearly, and I immediately want to hedge:
"I want to explore being a writer", or, "It's just a side thing—I'm still working part-time in a normal job."
But the reality is that I've been inspired by online writers like Henrik Karlsson, who makes a living from his Escaping Flatland essays on Substack, and Sasha Chapin, whose personal revelations have guided my own spiritual journeying. They've provided reference points that show me that there are ways of making this work as part of my identity.
I have hope.
I hope writing becomes a craft I can hone for life. I hope my words will resonate with people—that they will feel more freedom, more alive, less alone in their own messiness. I also hope it will scratch an itch—a deep desire to be seen.
I take heart from Neil Gaiman’s words
"Writing requires a little bit of ego. Hitting 'publish' is a writer's implicit way of saying they believe their words are worth someone's time to read."
I want my voice to matter. I want to hear "thanks for that—it really impacted me / made me think."
But I am also afraid.
Ultimately, I know that external validation will never satisfy the parts of me that never feel good enough. The work is not out there, after all, it's inside.
I worry that incorporating more writing into my life won't be the salve that makes my existential angst disappear, and that I'll still struggle with a sense of purposelessness.
I tense up at the imagined projections of everyone who's ever mocked me as they snicker in the background. There's also an inner critic asking, "Who do you think you are? You haven't studied writing or produced anything meaningful."
And yet, writing keeps me sane.
I've always taken notes; I've got journals filled with personal reflections and observations of the world. It helps me make sense of this bizarre experience of being human. I've always said I wanted to write a book.
But when push comes to shove, is this actually what I want? Or is it best reserved as a hobby? Frankly, I'm not going to play dice with the future and answer for future Dario. The path is made by walking.
First, I shall call myself a writer. I’m not 100% certain about it, but it's my best guess for the next step on the path.
Purgatory
I think I've felt this brewing inside for a while now, but I haven't really known how to move forward with it. When you're circling on the outside, it's too large and nebulous a thing to sink your teeth into.
I've taken some steps in the general direction, but I haven't really been able to name them for what they are.
Here are some more of those iterations:
Iteration 7: Moving to Substack - $50
13th April, 2023. The writers I mentioned above both use Substack. It's a simple way to publish content online that lets you get on with it, rather than fiddling with the details. (To clarify, you don't pay to host on Substack; the $50 is only the fee to configure a personal domain.)
Iteration 8: dariodasilva.blog - $23 for domain
14th March, 2024. After sputtering along with personal.combiningminds.org, I bought the domain dariodasilva.blog. In the beginning, I didn't even want to call my writing a "blog" - too low brow, I thought. Don't ask me why I had that connotation—I honestly couldn't answer. But this next iteration seems to have represented another shift, embracing my need to be special, rather than distancing from it.
Despite these steps in the right direction, my published writing remained sporadic throughout 2023 and 2024. I was mostly dealing with the fallout from a broken heart, and my writing efforts were diverted, including a twenty-seven page letter to my ex exploring what had gone wrong in our relationship, owning my own shortcomings, and outlining a potential future together. Those pages might be the most important writing I've ever done, not because of what I wrote, but rather because of how they setup the resulting re-organizing of my identity.
Thankfully (fingers crossed), I seem to be beyond that relationship now, which has opened up the space to grapple with other pertinent questions.
Getting to the crux - it's time to get naked
Questions such as, how do I actually do this? Can I make it sustainable?
Step number one is to reveal more of myself online.
There is a school of writers à la Morgan Housel who say "write for yourself". Ironically, I've been doing that, but not sharing it publicly. My fear of judgment has been preventing that.
But it's time to give that a rest. Neil Gaiman offers this litmus test for authentic writing:
"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right."
Another reality is that the container for my personal online presence needs to grow. And perhaps the strangest thing about online presence is resonance.
If you read my last post, you'll know I recently suffered a concussion. Since I can't run, I've been doing a lot of walks. And on one of these walks, OneStutteringMind emerged again from the ether of my concussion consciousness.
There was something about the name that had resonance. People subscribed to the YouTube channel. My Twitter following grew to 2 700 people, before stagnating when my online identity changed. I'd thrown away genuine brand equity.
The unfortunate truth? dariodasilva.blog has zero resonance. There's no brand recognition. It's very generic and forgettable.
Iteration 9: One StaggeringMind
So here comes iteration nine: from dariodasilva.blog to onestaggeringmind.com
Like when Google became Alphabet or Facebook became Meta, or when your local coffee shop changed names but kept the same barista.
Stagger. It echoes the rhythm of "stutter", but carries richer meaning.
It recognizes the staggering aspects of existence—being astonished by its beauty, overwhelmed by its complexity, and moving unsteadily as if about to fall.
There's also something resonant about "one mind."
Is this truly my mind? Or am I one of many discrete emanations of a singular thing—God in embryonic form, as Andy Weir so elegantly captures in The Egg? It taps into the idea that we're part of a collective consciousness, that there's only one stream of phenomena we're all experiencing as localized entities.
Whatever the case, OneStaggeringMind feels like the right container for moving forward. It acknowledges the beauty and weight of being part of something larger than ourselves, and the uncertain steps we take as we navigate this awareness.
Oh, and I can reuse the logo I paid someone $20 to design.
Let's see what happens. It’s time to get naked.
If you're willing to stagger alongside me as I figure it out, subscribe below. Better yet, share it with a friend :)
P.S. I've taken the plunge and turned on subscriptions on Substack. This is one way to support my work, but is by no means an expectation. All my writing will remain open for the time-being.
P.P.S. Thank you to Warwick, my first subscriber as soon as I turned on payments before the post even went live.
P.P.P.S. Total cost of school fees = $875 for those who were wondering.