How Starting a Blog Is Like Having Twins

Starting a blog is like having twins. Well, sort of. There are similarities, in the same way getting a splinter is equivalent to hacking off your finger.

Before you realize you’re going to start a blog – or have twins – life is pretty cruisy. You have free time, and later on when you’re truly busy, you wonder what you used to do with all that free time.

I can drag out the reluctant analogy further: when you find out you’re having twins – or going to write a blog – you go into research mode. You read everything, scour the net, talk to people, and become an armchair critic, noting with fervor what you’ll do differently. Then comes the birth, that moment when theory becomes practice, when – almost literally – the shit hits the fan. The books are gone (airborne across the room in a fit of sleepless rage), the people are in hiding (who willingly listens to screaming?), and the websites make you feel inadequate. An epiphany of self-doubt is born.

That’s what happened on that fateful day five plus years ago, when my twins, Vivian and William, were snatched from my womb in a hospital in Bangkok. That’s what’s happening today, as my first blog leaves the draft section and enters Never Never-land.