I’ve used Obsidian for about 5 years. Look it up if you’re unfamiliar because it’s a hell of a tool. Using it has taught me a lot about myself, mostly. My relationship with this digital application is relatively long and a little complicated. I go through cycles with it — like everything — because I’ve always wanted to expand my use, but didn’t quite know how.

Obsidian is pretty simple: it is a note-taking and storage framework. It does not come with a manual, so its complications reflect the user’s. Sounds familiar, right? See also life and the humility it requires. Anyway, patience and understanding are required. Yeah, I’m aware that sounds like a contradiction, but I don’t mean you should know the tool because using it effortlessly requires only one thing: purpose. Well, that and your understanding of why you are recording anything.

That was my problem. Figuring out just what the hell I really wanted to do with the nearly 10 years of my journal writing came down to one surprising thing. At first I thought I wanted to make something — not that I knew what “it” was. But after all this time, I simply want to understand myself more. Okay, that and suss out the deeper relationship between how I look at things and the things themselves.

Not exactly a simple task — but an illuminating one. I guess the background complication delayed my thoughtfulness of how I could use Obsidian in creative works. You won’t know it, but now that I’ve reached a few internal conclusions, the rest of these entries will lean heavily on writing derived from that application. It really doesn’t matter, but getting to the bottom of this is a milestone worth marking.