Why I’m Writing Here

Writing on a personal website was not exactly on my radar.

As may become obvious soon enough, I don’t really think of myself as a writer. I also don’t love the negative interactions that can happen online, and I’ve never been someone who shares a lot about myself on social media.

So why bother?

Let me try to explain.

In a way, I’m writing this to you, but I’m also writing it for myself. In my own small way, I want to participate in conversations I’ve spent years listening to from the sidelines. I want to think things through out loud, hold my ideas up for examination, and see where they lead. I’m hoping this helps me share my interests, my curiosity, and my excitement for the future, while also learning and improving along the way.

A Brief History of My Journey to This Blog

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in technology. “Interested” feels like the right word to describe my general fascination with it, along with my occasional attempts to dabble in it more directly.

In high school, I took a class called Broad-Based Technology. I still remember being captivated by the range of things we got to try: creating digital compositions with a MIDI keyboard, building my first webpage in HTML, using recording equipment to broadcast a conversation, disassembling and reassembling a small motor, and playing Myst on a PC. Do you remember Myst?

Those experiences gave me a clearer sense of what technology could do. I had a vague but persistent feeling that technological progress was changing the world in a big way, even if the people around me were not talking about it very much in daily life.

That interest eventually led me to study mechanical engineering. Looking back, I still think it was the right first move for me. After my first year of university, though, I switched into kinesiology, with a focus on biomechanics. I enjoyed the applied biomechanics, loved the technology, and even enjoyed programming in MATLAB.

I enjoyed it enough that I went on to complete a master’s degree in Exercise and Sport Science, where I used a Vicon motion capture system and force plates to collect movement and force data for gait analysis. It felt like a fascinating intersection of health, movement, engineering, and technology.

Once my master’s thesis was done, though, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I considered teaching and even signed up to teach biomechanics. I had also applied to, and been accepted into, a physiotherapy program around the same time I started my biomechanics master’s degree, but I had ultimately chosen not to pursue it.

Then, the summer before I was supposed to start teaching, I injured my shoulder and went through physiotherapy myself. That experience pushed me to take a year off, work as a physiotherapy assistant, and see whether it was a field I wanted to explore further.

It turns out I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I still wasn’t sure how I was going to scratch the technology itch in physiotherapy, but it felt good helping people get back to doing the things they loved. This is where my interest in health really comes in.

Like many people in my profession, I came to physiotherapy through years of playing sports, getting injured, and learning the hard way that the body has limits. In my early teens, I started to understand how important it is to take care of yourself, and how easy it is to injure yourself or hold back your performance through poor training, poor recovery, or poor nutrition.

That sparked a lifelong interest in fitness, health, and longevity. For years, I’ve followed research in these areas, both for myself and for my patients.

Throughout my schooling and career as a physiotherapist, I’ve also kept following science and technology news. I often found myself making connections between cutting-edge advancements and how they might eventually improve my practice, the broader medical field, and the world as a whole.

I would talk excitedly about discoveries in computer science, biotechnology, materials science, and other fields to anyone willing to listen. For a while, I assumed other people spent as much time and energy reading and thinking about this stuff as I did.

Slowly, I learned that this is not necessarily the case. At least in my own circle of physiotherapists and health professionals, it is not especially common to be borderline fanatical about science and technology — especially while also being intensely optimistic about what these innovations could mean for the future.

So here we are.

I’m a practicing orthopaedic physiotherapist with a genuine love for health, science, and technology. I spend much of my free time reading and thinking about how the next few years might unfold.

I think that comes from a few different places: childlike curiosity, excitement for the future, a desire to understand what is driving the ever-faster change we are living through, and a need to help guide my children as they make choices about their own futures.

And, if I’m being honest, there is probably also a selfish hope mixed in: that advancements in health and medicine will allow me and the people I love to live longer, healthier lives, so we can stick around and see what happens next.

I think it’s going to be an interesting ride.