Hi there 👋 Welcome to my little corner of the internet. My name is Emily, and I am excited to begin sharing my journey with you. Starting a blog has been on my mind for quite some time and it’s finally here! In my first post, I hope to give you a bit of background information about who I am and why I am writing this!
Who am I?
Before I go any further, I feel that it’s important for me to talk about who I am and give you a brief idea of “who is Emily?”. My story began in 1999 in an English town called Wigan. Being born in 1999 comes with some quite interesting dilemmas, the main one being the demographic cohort I was assigned: Generation Z. I like to try and pretend that I don’t care much about it, but it’s something which regularly comes to mind. The world sees me as someone who grew up playing Fortnite and posting on TikTok but in reality, I grew up with dial up internet and VHS. Perhaps I am one of those edge cases who doesn’t quite fit into those boxes, which society has created. It wouldn’t be the first time, thats for sure! Anyway, thats enough about demographic cohorts for now. I suspect a post in the near future where I investigate the cohort dilemma further.
I was born and grew up in Wigan, which is situated in historical Lancashire. Nope, I am not going to let myself get into that. If I were you, I would expect to read another post in the future about my thoughts on the whole Greater Manchester/Lancashire debacle. For now, I am just going to say that Wigan is a town located in north west England, between Manchester and Liverpool. You may have heard of Wigan from its football team ‘Wigan Athletic’ or its rugby team ‘Wigan Warriors’ but in reality, I don’t care much for either of these. I have tried to get into sports in the past but it’s simply something which doesn’t interest me. It’s something which regularly made me stand out as being different while growing up. It seemed that everyone was either a huge rugby fan or a huge football fan. There weren’t really many people like me, who didn’t care for either of them. It certainly led to some awkward interactions, similar to the “Manchester United or Manchester City” question I get asked after telling people that I am from Manchester. Not being into sports led to me finding my true passions within tech. There wasn’t really anything else to do!
At its core, Wigan is one of those towns which doesn’t really have much left for young people. It’s too far from Manchester to get its hustle and bustle and generally pretty quiet. It’s also not very diverse in terms of population. I can see how growing up there has shaped who I am today, with a desire to explore other parts of the world and learn as much as I can about other cultures. These days I try to travel, whenever the opportunity arises. Usually, this is because I am going to Eurovision or visiting a theme park. I am quite obsessed with these and can see myself writing a lot about them within this blog.
What to expect from this blog?
As I begin to write this section, I am realising that I don’t yet have a clear idea for what content I wish to post. Perhaps before discussing the content I plan to post, I should briefly discuss my motivations to do so. Hopefully this will give me some clearer idea of the content which I wish to write about.
When I had it in mind that I would actively put in work to make a blog about my life, my motivation was simple. I wanted a space where I could document my experiences and memories as well as a place to reflect upon those. However, I could do this anywhere. I could make a notes section on my phone, or use one of the countless other apps which aim to provide the tools to write a diary. In fact, I initially began to write my diary with the Diary app on iPhone but something was missing. It was a big enough deal that I didn’t stick with my initial plans to log my life. That thing, was the ability to share stories. Yes, this is primarily a diary for me, but the edge cases are important too. The times when I would like to share adventures with friends or aspects of my life which aren’t so easy to speak about in person. For this reason, I decided that I should write my stories into a blog post format, in a place that I can share with the people I care about.
You may be thinking to yourself that I could just write this and submit it to a private domain, somewhere where its less easily accessible to the big wide world but this is where things get more complicated. As a transgender woman, I would like to do more to show other people like me that it’s still possible to have a great life, filled with love and great memories. It’s something that I would have wanted when I began my transition. A place where I could learn about the experiences and day to day lives of other trans people. Initially, my brain was working on two separate chains of thought. The first was to document my life and the second was to help other trans people. Given that my plans had morphed into writing an online blog, it then made sense that I merge the two ideas into a single blog. I don’t plan to focus on gender identity or what its like to be trans (though this may come up from time to time) and instead I wish to focus more on my lived experiences and life stories.
This blog exists as a way for me to document my life, for myself, and occasionally post things that other people find interesting. Sometimes the other people may be friends and family and sometimes they may be written with other trans people in mind. There is also a third (yet smaller) category of people who may find this interesting to read. Those are the people who share common interests and hobbies to me. As someone who is fascinated by different aspects of engineering, I have countless projects which I would like to document. This space will act as a place where I can share progress updates and ideas about the things I spend my free time building. I suspect that it may be quite morphed sometimes, without a clear idea of which category a particular post falls into. This is something which is by choice. I hope that by adding a bit of my personal flair to each of these posts, I can capture my life as I experience it.
With everything written above in mind, here is a breakdown of some key ideas I wish to write about:
Posts About Engineering and Design
Since I began my undergraduate studies, I have had numerous ongoing projects which I would like to share with the world. The longest of which is my DIY digitally controlled analog synthesizer which I began around 7 years ago, when I had no clue about electronics. I still have some early documentation and study notes that I used to design my schematics and would like to revisit each of these with archive posts. Whenever I revisit my old notes, or write a post from memory, there will be 2 dates listed on the post. One date will represent the day I published the writing and the other will represent the date I wrote the initial documentation.
Another key project which I will probably write about a lot is my 3D printed fairground ride. This is another of my ongoing projects, which began around a year ago. As I write this, I can see myself talking a lot about everything from designing parts, to designing the circuit boards which power the ride. Because of the physical restrictions which come from using miniature parts, many serious engineering challenges must be solved in order to finish the project. Updates for this particular project will likely continue for a few more years.
Travel Stories
In recent times, I have noticed a shift in my ability to remember places that I visited more than a few years ago. I feel that this is in part due to getting older but also because of the amount of travelling which I have done. I hope to preserve past holiday memories as well as write new stories while I travel. Similarly to the engineering projects, holiday memories will be listed with 2 dates, to help provide a complete timeline of when I visited vs wrote about my travels. Expect everything from Eurovision holidays to countries that don’t exist (aka Transnistria).
Everything Else
It’s important for me that I don’t set too many rules for this blog. While this mostly refers to upload schedule, it also refers to the content I write. There shouldn’t be any pressure to write about a specific topic and I should be free to write about whatever I decide to at the time. This means that there will probably be a lot of random stories and topics which I would like to talk about, depending on my mood. Remember I mentioned the cohort dilemma, this fits into this category.
What’s Next?
The beauty of writing a blog about anything in my life is the wide range of posts that I can write. As my mood and interests change, so will the content that I post about. This isn’t something that should become a chore or something that I need to do. It should be an outlet for me to write about what I want to, when I want to. As such, its hard to give a plan or schedule for posts. I do however, have a few stories already written about past travel experiences , which will be published in the near future.
Until next time!