Who I Am

Hello, my name is Alexandra Muniz, but I prefer Alex, and this is my digital portfolio. Look, I must be honest, I just needed SOMEWHERE to put all my writings. It’s hard enough having them scattered throughout Google and Word documents, not to mention the countless vague and poorly edited notes I have on my phone. I guess I assumed by the time I turned 23 I’d have a lovely archive of all my work and an accurate assessment of my style and passions. But alas, I still have no idea who I am or what this is. I’ve never been one to organize my thoughts, and my writing is no better. So when it came time to name this website, I had no idea what to pick. What phrase could encompass my work? What is my work? I’m still not sure. So, I landed on The Astronomers Library, a place I’ve made up in my head that I seem to go to every time I look for things to write about. I don’t think it’s an actual astronomer’s library; a symbolic one, maybe. Someone who explores the outer regions of things that look complete but harbor so many secrets. I imagine this place filled with as many books as there are stars, and they’re all filled with topics ranging from science, to art, to history, to language, and beyond. That’s what I like to write about, anything I think holds something deeper. Megolophobia is the fear of gigantic things in proportion to the smallness of the human frame. I think my drive to write is the opposite of this phenomenon. I revel in enormous things and ideas and I must give them some mythology to ground them to myself, as I think such things feel farther away if there is nothing I’ve invented to hold them down. It’s like when they say things seem smaller once you understand them, I feel things become incredibly bigger once I’ve made up a story or some odd tale. So this is that library. All of my stories are here, ranging in a multitude of topics. And of course, some of my opinion pieces and articles, because I also grant this philosophy to real events and things. I’d like this to be a place you can get lost in, skimming through rows and rows of leather-bound books with odd characters and designs; covers which seem to house information not of this world. I’m still building each column, each shelf, and arranging the fixtures to give this place some semblance of correlation, but for now, it’s just this.