#personal archives

if you read this, and have read any of my writing on here: THANK YOU. it's really cool to have a little community of writers and creatives on the internet that read your stuff and interact with it at all. 11-15 year old me that was absolutely intoxicated by tumblr when i first found it would be very happy to see me actually putting our thoughts out there, and see that anyone at all supported them. xoxo

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as i hinted at in the intro, tumblr was a weird little corner of the internet that i found in middle school before any of my friends at the time knew what it was. when i saw people reblogging posts about the fandoms they were into, and saw a sliver of community in folks yapping about their shared interests, i was enraptured. people sharing cool art and infodumping with each other? sign me up, literally. i was too chickenshit to put any of my writing or art out the at the time, but i adored the concept, and reblogged cool things like my life depended on it.

for context, i grew up on the top of a ridge in a rural part of southwestern PA, in a little unincorporated community that fended for themselves most of the time (i'm talking gravel dirt road, a decent drive away from most resources and actual neighborhoods -- stuff people would see and go "i can hear the sound of banjoes!" if they somehow ended up lost on our road). for most of my life up on the ridge, i was the only kid around, and my default setting was either putting all of my creative energy and random thoughts into spiralbound notebooks that no one would read, or talking about it to, not with my mom nonstop (love ya mom, sorry if i was annoying as shit ♡ ). additionally, we had dial-up much longer than most people up on the ridge, and couldn't even get your standard commercial internet providers up there, so finding fun corners of the web up there carried more weight, more significance. things took a painfully slow moment to load, but when it did, it felt like treasure.

i'm setting the scene here only to emphasize just how revolutionary finding a place like tumblr felt. i cared about other social media only because having accounts when you're younger than thirteen wasn't allowed (unless you, cough cough, lied or put your mom's birth year in instead of your own. once again: sorry, mom), but none of them held a candle to tumblr. on tumblr, whether i divulged who i was or not, i digitally practiced being as authentic to myself as would allow. no instagram filters, no masking how interested in topics that i loved: just a direct line to my tween/teen stream of consciousness where i could dump all of that weird hormonal energy somewhere and then carry on with my outside life as normal.

all of that being said, when i came to the realization that i should get back in the habit of writing more to better acclimate to full-time doctoral studies, and try to write more for my own enjoyment as opposed to writing to complete an assignment or meet a deadline, i was considering more "professional" platforms like substack, or some kind of livejournal blog: something with a seemingly-genuine-but-actually-deliberately-curated tone to put things out there, check the to-do box in my head, and give myself a pat on the back. as soon as i signed up for my substack account, though, i already felt exhausted at the idea of filtering myself or masking that much. this ritual of self-filtration is something that i, we, do enough at work, in daily social situations, and i wasn't about to torture myself to do so in another format under the guise of doing something that i love. it sounds masochistic to do that, almost, now that i type it out. i stand by my decision to end up here instead of a more buttoned-up platform.

this idea of deliberate authenticity in your interactions, fragments of the self (hi jung, you crazy mfer), and assessing how unadulterated you are online was also top of mind because of reading how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy by jenny odell -- which is a FABULOUS book, if you haven't read it. odell references great writers and thinkers throughout the book on a variety of topics related to how you divide (and algorithms everywhere fight for, tooth and nail) your selves and your attention up online, and mentioned audre lorde's own struggles at unifying parts of herself (quote below from sister outsider: essays and speeches):

"I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self."

as a neurodivergent person that has been obsessed with the concept of self fragmentation ever since i saw jung's own writing on it in high school and connected it to my own experience of diluting my enthusiasm and passion to cater to the comfort of others, this quote and odell's care-filled analysis of it stuck out on the page like a giant billboard with flashing lights and an arrow that said, "hey, look, it's that thing that you're exhausted by all of the time."

of course, i want to be careful and point out that lorde's writing and oration also connects to her lived experience with blackness in america, which i do not have the tools to fully relate to as a white person. with that care in place, i still felt very spoken to, with, at when i read this quote, and was also reading it at a time where i was not only debating what type of silly blog to run on the internet to dump my writing, but i took in the words at a time in my mid twenties where being true to myself felt like the antidote to and mending of so much time spent waging a war on the true me, on my real passions and thoughts and feelings. with this in mind, i had my sights set on building a little spot in the cavernous space of the internet where i could relish in being me, unapologetically, and found myself returning to this goddamn hellsite to do it.

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it's early here, but i want to wrap this up to spend more time with my mom before i fly home. i would normally do drafts and reworkings of something like this before putting it out there for all to see, but that doesn't really resonate with the theme of little-to-no filtering of my authentic self, does it?