this blogpost is a companion of my video on stoa i'm documenting the starting point of my creative journey after 5 years of depression and mental health struggles. medicated for bipolar disorder and having become overly dependent on llms, i've lost much of my creativity and thinking ability. i've decided to break this cycle by committing to create, learn, and document everything along the way. to support this journey, i've built my own markup language called stoa - inspired by the philosophy of minimalism, editor independence, and strictness. unlike complex languages like neorg, stoa can be learned in 10 minutes with just 47 lines of grammar. it's designed around two core concepts: columns and inlines, processed by a single-pass compiler written in nimlang. the technical implementation uses finite state machines to parse different column types (headings, lists, sidenotes, etc.) and processes files line by line without building complex asts. i hope sharing this journey might help others facing similar struggles with mental health and creative paralysis.