the flowers are blooming, and the air smells sweet. spring is about growth. spring is about renewal. so i'm feeding into the ebbs and flows, leaning into the meandering, leaving behind oxbow lakes as i find the paths of least resistance on my way across the plains.
this will be the first post written explicitly for neocities, so is kind of my first post here, but for my own archive's sake, there will be a chronologically older post from. well. a blog that i chose to abandon after asserting that i had finally made a decision about committing to a platform. whatever. oxbow lakes, like i said. in that post i said neocities and the decision-making process of building a website was too intimidating for me to attempt. i didn't mean to lie. but the more i thought about it, the more i wanted to do it anyway. partially to reaffirm my (minor) html skillz, my longing for the design power of internets past, the draw to be stubborn. its nothing crazy, but its something! that didn't exist before!
i don't know what i plan on including on here, but we'll see what happens as i flesh it all out. whatever strikes i suppose!
sarah
on indecision
sometimes i find myself far too caught up in the details.
i'd been thinking about, for a while, returning in some capacity to long-form writing, whether that be essay format, fiction of some kind, or something more diaristic. conversations with my undergrad (and now master's) supervisor yielded similar conclusions (not that i would show my supervisor this. to be clear) i have a lot of thoughts – why not give them somewhere to go? and yet despite all things pointing towards this being a good idea... i simply hadn't yet done anything to bring this to fruition. it feels good to write. it feels good to sit down and put something out into the world that can explore, in small ways, my view of and experience in this place. and what a privilege it is to be able to do so. yet, i have sat stagnant, algae creeping in and sliming up the mechanisms of my brain as i sit paralysed. i really truly think that it's because i'm endlessly caught up in all the small and future details of things which do not even exist. i let myself be cast away by the choice of platform, what to write about, the quality of the writing, who might see it, if its even worth it at all if its going to come with all this fucking anxiety-inducing baggage. i could fall down any one of these rabbitholes every time i mustered up the courage to try – tumblr feels too much like social media, despite its origins as a micro-blogging platform. wordpress feels to professional for what i could be putting out. substack feels as if every post is meant to be thoughtful. medium didn't seem a good fit because i don't have ten tips for improving your productivity hiding in my back pocket. while i like neocities conceptually, ultimate creative html freedom is a terrifying prospect to someone already struggling with the weight of analysis paralysis. and so, we return, fruitless, to square one.
i hope (desperately, do i hope) that this can finally be my edenic apple.
by that, i mean i hope this can be the plunge that liberates me while equally confronting the constant agonizing fear about putting myself out there. i will take a bite, feel exposed, maybe find a leaf to assuage my shame, but continue on anyways.
this platform encourages you to pay for a premium membership by only allowing for this basic, simplistic theme under the free version. this will, however, backfire in my case because i simply cannot be convinced to pay for the ability to scribble on the internet, and it in turn, puts me in the cattle chute that only allows me to go one direction. removing my free will is what sets me free, i guess. this platform maybe won't be perfect, maybe i'll migrate elsewhere when winter comes. but for the time being, i can roost here.
that's one thing resolved. i'm nonetheless limited still by the horror of knowing what to even write – i suppose it's easiest to bang out these train-of-thought personal journal-like posts because there can be no fear of disagreement, this being perhaps my actual biggest writing inhibitor. essay-style posts about the world or media interpretation leave me daunted by the possibility of disagreement, and while i understand that that is an inevitable part of subjectivity. well. i dont like it. there are worms and gremlins and other assorted decomposers that live in my mind and they spend exorbitant amounts of energy convincing me that unless i have considered every conceivable angle and aspect, pored over every minutiae, taken every perspective, and perfectly and strictly followed the logic all the way down, there will be SOMEONE to come out of the woodwork, point their finger, and tell me that because i have missed such-and-such crucial detail, my entire analytical foundation will crumble and i'll have missed the whole point and also i stink.
this, of course, means that having deeper opinions on things ends up feeling like a monumental taking-on, where i have to justify every statement, verify every justification, and for all of which, i need evidence. my throwaway thoughts can rarely just be that – what if, contained in that thought, is a misunderstanding so egregious, SO fundamental, that my credibility as Person With A Brain will be entirely annihilated on account of me not even being aware of such a flagrant transgression? everyone will see my true lack of thinking, the completely disparate vacuity that i've been managing to hide by regurgitating and recycling the thoughts of others, revealed finally as a one of the sheeple, duped and doomed. UNLESS, of course, i sit with that thought for so long that i can (almost) be certain it has no flaws, no possible holes to be poked, airtight, irrefutable. and man. is that tiring.
this, also, is not a cry against disagreement or criticism or other people having different ideas from me. OF COURSE people are going to have different thoughts than me. this is coming from a place of anxiety that somehow, everyone else is smarter, wiser, and more thoughtful than me. insert meme about wishing that identifying emotions and feelings meant i could control them. i don't want this to teeter into me complaining about having to use my critical thinking skills either, nor do i want it to seem like an excuse to not have well-thought out opinions. sometimes 'i'm not educated enough on this subject to have a good opinion' CAN be a valid, thoughtful answer. but most often, this is used as an excuse to distance yourself from the thinking at all. this is not something i want to do. i think fundamentally i am a seeker, an eternal wanter of more. i WANT to do all the thinking. i want to do all the feeling and seeing and smelling and tasting and hearing for myself, gathering all the information on this stupid little earth that i can. synthesizing all this information into a clean and dusted line of thinking is just tricky when i am so prone to being endlessly stuck in reaching some kind of Platonic perfection in my logic.
this bane proves handy as a boon when it comes to academic writing, however, and if i did enough reflection, is almost certainly a major player in my enjoyment of academia. paper-writing inherently leaves no room for throwaway thought, and by it's nature demands statements to be justified, justifications verified, and evidence provided. i love the exercise in thoroughness, however exhausting sometimes. so why then is it that academic writing, submitted specifically to be judged, comes more easily to me than, say, writing character analysis, not for marks, on the internet? i suspect it has to do with motivation, where academia is a very pressing and real external motivator. not only do i have to do this writing, but something rides on my ability to get it done. the internal motivation of 'because i want to' just isn't enough sometimes. which is frustrating for a whole host of reasons beyond meaningless writing on the internet, and bleeds so much into the rest of my life that it makes me ill to think about too much. this has become starkly obvious to me in this gap year as i continue to flounder looking for external motivation to do much of anything at all. but that's not what this is about.
for now, this is about baby steps in decision making. this is about holding an olive branch out to myself and saying 'let's not invent critics before we even do anything.' this is about, even if there were critics, letting it be not a reflection of my personhood and failure as Person With A Brain. this is about fear. this is about moving through the fear. this is about me sorting through why its taken me so long to just write anything at all. this is me dumping my evil little brain onto a page just to say i did it. this is about me never being able to play sims or minecraft because i was overwhelmed with the freedom of it all. this is about me, days after publishing this post, already rethinking the platform. fucks sake