This website is personal
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the fact that anything you put online can live forever. Even when you evolve and change as a person: your thoughts, your values, your opinions, your past-self still exists in this ephemeral space.
That is beautiful and terrifying.
I've been thinking a lot recently about what I share where on the internet. I sometimes toot consistently and conversationally on Mastodon for a week or so at a time; I post a couple of times a year on Instagram, moreso on stories but even that has petered out a lot; and here on my website I have started holding blog posts up on this pedastal as something that need to be substantial or at least a little bit interesting. Somehow, even here, the lure of professionalism and validation has kicked in.
i want to read your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions of the world as it's happening around you. romanticize your life; tell me the minute details of your commute—your perception is yours, after all, and i've never experienced it before. Xandra: Everyone should blog
It's funny, because the blogs and articles that I want to read, like Xandra, are personal ones. Midnight musings, a day in the life of. Heck, I spend hours watching YouTube videos of artists just going about their daily errands. That's the feeling with which I started this website, with short posts (microblogs?) on my favourite tiny things and a deadly mushrooms. But that freeness of sharing quickly evaporated and was replaced with more developer-orientated content like a bookmarklet I made to edit everything and what I had learnt about in my CPD. I began to hold an expection that my content should be useful to someone, to have a clear and concise structure, and to leave the reader with something better at the end of it. But in doing so, I have sacrificed that cozy, personal-ness of my website.
As a long term word-struggler, I have always been on a quest to write things more succinctly or interestingly or more fancifully. Sometimes, I write micro-fiction that is full of mystery with no actual plot points or answers. Sometimes, I pick up a solo journalling game, like Be Like A Crow or Apothecaria, but abandon it before the story really achieves anything. I play in a 'Play by Post' game with some friends where I write 200-400 words or so every week. Sometimes, I come up with a banger of a blog post idea, only to find myself grappling with writing the content, and eventually adding it to my increasing pile of forgotten drafts.
But to heck with it. This website is personal. It can and will show my struggles with writing, my incoherence and inconsistency because that is my experience, it will also share my unique and interesting perspective on life because that is also my experience.
In the words of Keenan, share your big dumb beautiful self.
Footnotes
This blog post title was inspired by David Cox's 'This website is personal (in a a good way)' where he writes nice and cleanly about his new personal website and goals. A farcry from what this blog post is 😁