Intro

While writing has been perhaps my greatest outlet in both the best and worst of times, it’s been a long time since I’ve made any personal works public. Let’s work on changing that, together.

I love to write, but I don’t do it enough.

It’s really a combination of things: time, energy, ideas too big for me to even put down into words. Fear. I’ve had more than my share of things get in the way of pouring my heart out to the masses. To be honest, I miss it.

In high school, I tried to blog once a month. It was entirely an exercise in self-indulgence; the only reading I did back then came from the Gospel of Peart, which was a first-person account of his day-to-day life. The difference between Neil Peart and 16-year-old Zach Bernard is that Neil had more interesting and important things to say than any mundane shit I threw at the wall.

But I had an audience among my peers; people read it. The irrelevant musings of a 16-year-old who had no concept of himself was able to generate at least somewhat of a demand, and at the time, I didn’t question it; my ego thought people should read these words. As ridiculous as that sounds to me now, this was good for me. I’m a perfectionist, less than I was back then, and in being one I agonized over my writing being a good representation of my brain.

That made me a better writer. I would play with structure, eliminate redundancies, try to make things different in each piece, while always searching for a consistent narrative voice. I became an aggressive self-editor, which in turn made me an aggressive editor and writing critic in general. Anyone who’s been edited by me at RO Baseball can attest to this.

In college, I wrote less. As one does when they go to college, I changed a lot. I learned more about myself and, as a journalism major and political science minor, read a lot of insightful stuff and continued to refine my voice, albeit in different mediums of radio and television.

But the big change happened when I was a senior at Illinois State and, completely by chance, discovered Zen Buddhism and accepted it not as religion, but as a philosophy for life. It was one of the healthiest decisions I’ve ever made for myself. Months later, weeks before going away to Springfield for grad school, I embraced a concept I lacked for 22 years: empathy.

That may seem weird to you, but I grew up in a very self-serving environment. How am I affected by the actions of another, positively or negatively? Until August 2014, I was living a selfish existence, and to this day there are a lot of interactions from the past I wish I can redo. Alas, time presses onward…

Empathy, and the embrace of it, was genuinely life altering for me. It allowed me to legitimately place myself in the shoes of someone who may be on more challenging times than I, while trying to understand their concerns with an open and compassionate outlook instead of snap judgment. I believe this has made me not only a better journalist and writer, but also a better person.

Since embracing Zen and empathy, I’ve walked on clouds and fallen into valleys. I’ve consumed life at its most joyous and have become so nauseous by it that I’ve considered ending it. The latter was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a turning point in my life, and in the two-and-a-half years since, there’s been a lot of searching for identity, for truth and, above all else, for peace.

The next step toward finding peace is to start writing again. Before I was diagnosed with anxiety/depression, before I knew how to acknowledge it, I wrote. Blogs, poetry for god’s sake. It was my outlet. But the challenge I face now is one of transition: in the simplest terms, writing like an adult.

It’s easy to write minutiae that feels important to your life, rattling off stream of conscious thoughts that, again, mean something to the writer but as years go on, mean less and less to the reader. The primary objective of writing like an adult is to take these big thoughts, ideas and concepts I have and structure them into something that’s truly meaningful not just to me, but also to you.

My paradigm shift over the last couple of years has helped me adopt the popular belief that life is not a destination but a journey. We are all going to the same place, however bright or dark the place may appear to you or me. I know that I’m never going to arrive at identity, at truth, at peace. But I know each rest stop along the way — the journey — will bring me closer.

Road trips are better with company. I want you along for the ride.

Make no mistake, this website will still feature the standard hallmarks of my writing: album reviews, sports retrospectives, TV show analyses, and I want to begin doing video game reviews whenever I take on a new thing, because I get really into them. I don’t want to abandon these things, because writing them makes me happy.

But there are a lot of things happening in my brain. Ideas of life, fear, philosophy, mental health and the human condition, world affairs, nostalgia. And I want to start publishing writing on these ideas, whether it’s a deeply-vetted feature or poetry I scribbled in a notepad in between breaks. I want to find some peace for me while providing something meaningful to you.

I hope you’ll come with me.