Digital me

Well, the month started with a physical and mental injury that I won’t go into detail about other than to say they both started with a little twinge of pain before exploding into something totally immobilizing.

I’ve taken my pains as a good excuse to not write. Instead, I’ve started thinking about my website.

I love the revival of the “old internet”. I love how honest personal websites were. The aesthetics ranged from so minimal it was just font on a blank background to unnavigable glitter bombs. People blogged about deep and trivial things and made shrines—I forgot we called them shrines!—to their interests.

I’ve become terribly nostalgic about it. I love that the early internet’s dominant culture was one of creation. No one had to share. Very few people were making money off their websites. But people put stuff out there because that’s what was done. If there was any art you were even slightly interested in, the internet was the place for it, regardless of quality. And if you didn’t have anything original to post, you made a fan site, or you curated a bunch of sites about a topic you liked. A personal site could be one or all of these things.

I miss everyone casually blogging, too. With strangers' blogs, there was a fantasy of a person and a life behind it. With friends' blogs, there was a depth and humanity that I rarely got to encounter when we just hung out. But blogging turned to vague posting, and then lifestyle-curating, and then engagement baiting. Personal websites did have a few toes dipped in those pools, but these days we are underwater.

I keep a diary. Several, really. I like looking back on time in an organized, linear way, but I also just like making stuff spur of the moment. I may or may not stick with a format or commit to learning to draw or make collages, but I think it’s the promise of spontaneous, personal creativity that appeals to me. 

But when I try to post online, that feeling goes out the window. 

Somewhere alone the way, I ingested the idea that social media accounts need to have a niche. Predictable content is required if you want it to grow. No one wants to follow a poetry account and then be suddenly inundated with mediocre pictures of a garden. What you create is about the potential audience that wants it.

That’s all well and good, but I always get caught up in this web of, “What kind of specific, niche content actually represents me? What do I want to commit to making that will allow people to understand me deeply as a person?” Not everyone wants, needs, or desires to be deeply understood by people who happen across their socials, but I feel like that’s the only appeal social media has for me—the opportunity to connect to other people despite the limits of physicality. A way for people to know me without being stopped by shyness or etiquette or time and space.

And after a few days of admiring the early internet, I think I finally understand my struggles. Nothing represents me. No one thing I make, no one aesthetic, no one artistic medium. I am pictures of flowers and pixel art and writing and amateur stabs at different aesthetics and low quality videos. I’ve always admired people who have callings, who are good at one thing and seamlessly transition from amateur to professional as they age, seemingly never agonizing over the best way to get the maximum amount of fulfillment out of their life before it’s over.

I am not that person. At any given moment, I’m writhing in existential dread. I want to connect with others in a deep and meaningful way through writing, but I want to be more than that, too. I want to express the part of myself that gets excited about new things. I think people should know that I can be kinda corny, or an obsessed nerd. I just don’t want to be this flattened, consumable thing that churns out fiction, even if that fiction is good or somehow gets popular one day. I want to make real contact with this nebulous, once human entity that is the internet. Because it contacted me first. And it gave me things. Feelings. Information. Experiences. All things I treasure.

I think the best way to share that idealistic and improbable vision of my digital self is a website. I can keep things organized while also feeling like I’m representing a more cohesive collection of self. And if I feel like it, I can always make a bunch of accounts for all my weird niches on social media later.

That’s where I am with my digital identity right now. And now that I’ve written all this bellyaching and idealizing of the internet, it just feels like an elaborate ruse to keep myself from doing the work I’m really meant to be doing, which is editing Eulily. But I can have hobbies. At least 1,000 of them, since that’s how many pages squarespace allows you to have. 

C.E.