fresh start

a quick hello to kick this off!

I spent half of the first semi-meaningful blog post I ever wrote wondering what to write. The other half I spent waxing poetic about building relationships with fictional characters my high school self dreamed up for writing projects I imagined would one day be my debut published work. Clearly (and thankfully), only snippets of that writing era saw online daylight, and I’m here in my early twenties with the same core issue as past Arya.

But this time around, I’ve somehow convinced myself that sharing my stories come with higher stakes. I wish I could channel whatever creative-confidence juice flowed through me back then, although I know my long-time friends would say I’ve historically struggled to embrace the creative juice just as much. So maybe my supposed growth over the years has been more of stagnation?

I facilitate storytelling for a living now—which feels weird to say, but a good chunk of what I spend my day thinking about is how to help people tell stories in their own voices. In doing so, I often worry I’ve forgotten how to do the same for myself. The upcoming year feels like it’ll have plenty of interesting enough stories to tell, though—I’m living the young adult life my childhood self admired in other people, I’m well into developing a couple exciting book projects, and I’m planning a wedding (yes, for myself). A lot of the people I’ve been watching and listening to content from lately have been very much hinting at things like “start before you’re ready” and “focus on documenting,” which feel like much-welcome, lower-stakes ways to broach beginning a fresh blog (after years of writing in the same place I wrote that very first post at thirteen years old).

All that being said, welcome to seastarya. We’re not really sure about any real rules or strategy here; we’re very much figuring it out on the fly (“we” being me, of course). Some things you can expect: recaps on things happening in the biology world, reviews of books (many of them science-related), behind-the-scenes and how-to’s of art projects, plenty of podcast recs for long commutes (courtesy of my certified fiancé who does a lot of commuting), amateur-to-amateur tips on maintaining tiny aquariums, love letters to plants bringing some good spice n’ drama to my weeks ... the works. We’ll see how this goes.