Honestly not sure why I decided to spin up a new blog now. I've historically been pretty bad at sticking through with things ever since college beat me down and destroyed all sense of originality I had, but I have been thinking more about writing again recently, and it really felt like coming back to my roots on blogger was perhaps a way to coax something out of my brain.
It didn't feel right continuing with the blog I had in high school (especially since reading anything I wrote from over like five years ago gives me a sense of cringe to the point where I can't even finish reading anything I wrote, and it feels wrong to go back and edit out all the now-questionable things I wrote about or presently-offensive phrases and slang that may have been popular back in the day), so for now let's start with this blank slate I guess.
Part of me feels a little defeated because at some level, it does feel like this urge to share my thoughts with the internet come from a place of pandering where I want to feel validation for my thoughts and feel some sort of connection to the Judging Masses™, and there is certainly a part of me that thinks I should not feel this way (I am an independent thinker etcetera etcetera, I don't need the Masses' approval for anything!) ... and yet here we are.
I suppose my recent reorganizing of my instagram accounts and sharing an update on Cheddar's Tripawds Community blog has also been part of this recent urge to spew my thoughts into the void and express myself one way or another, but I have been struggling with this idea of self branding and someone's online personal brand and presence. It seems like a lot of the personalities that I follow at least have some sort of niche that they present themselves to and are fully a part of. For example, a lot of artists on Twitter and Instagram only post art and most of the time, we followers rarely get a sense of who the creator is. Part of this may also be a privacy aspect I suppose. But it still carries over to like... Tech Twitter, where most everyone uses their real name and picture, and almost everything that someone posts will be somehow related to tech or working in the industry (to the point where if one posts something different... they lose followers?).
Personally, I've never really identified so strongly with just one 'interest' so to speak, so it's been kind of hard for me to think about how to represent myself online across these platforms. Partially, that is why I rarely post or tweet, and my instagram account is a random mish mash of non-congruent themes (the other part is that I don't feel like I have a lot to say that is valuable to people who may be more ingrained in these niches than myself, and also am not compulsive enough to really care about a lack of visual consistency in my social media). Maybe it is a disadvantage in terms of self marketing to not have consistency and a real 'audience', but this is part of the pandering train of thought that I dislike, so I figured it would be better for me to approach this authentically and just... embrace the mish mash? I kind of miss having a blog space where I can post about literally anything, and just categorize stuff using tags. That's kind of what I already do in my head anyway when trying to figure out what new thing to do each day in my spare time.
I also don't really feel comfortable having an actual newsletter (like substack), since it would usually be that like >50% of what I write about is random musings or stream of consciousness like what I've done here (which in hindsight is actually not that useful to anyone except maybe my future self). I'm not sure where I'd share that I've written a new blog post, since I used to just put it up as a Facebook status update but now I don't really feel like posting anything on Facebook at all. Uh so I guess that means if you found this and you want to stay tuned... use an old fashioned browser bookmark or something? Hah, we'll see where this leads.
Maybe this is all to say that... you might see a bunch of random things here soon! There are lots of things I've been mildly thinking of dumping on the internet, even if it doesn't really fit any sort of theme. If you check back here, you'll just find a bunch of stuff that I find interesting and that you may not, but maybe there will be some sort of miniscule overlap and you can sort by tags for content that you are interested in :)
Haha, part of me feels like I'm pretending to be a kid again doing this blog. Hopefully it's not too too cringe.
