Hello future me 🔗

I mean you and me both know that cliché title is stolen as shit, but at this point you really don’t care anymore. You’ve sat staring at this blank canvas of a project for far too long, feeling too restricted by your self-imposed constraints to actually get anything going. So in conversing with a sleeping person you realized that, at least to start, you need to converse with someone in order to get anything started at all around here. The original idea for this blog was as a potential portfolio of writing work to possibly be able to get some meat on your bones before looking into doing this professionally. Holding yourself to the standard you did suffocated any feeling that you could ever be happy with an idea, so your list of potential topics grew and grew. Which is why you decided to start this blog of with an unedited, rambling, poorly structured text that you knew wouldn’t meet your bare minimum standards. Much like an artist drawing a first large brush stroke on their canvas to not have it clean and pristine. This is the incarnation of that idea, you know that whatever you put your mind to after this will be more to your liking at least.

Places, people 🔗

At this point in your life you’ve been out of any regular social context for several months. When you tried to get back to school you were punched into the ninth dimension by the burnout you had been running from for years and years. Realizing you had no energy to undertake anything more demanding than simple existence you started removing things from your life that took from that precious limited supply, hoping to stabilize eventually. One of the first things to go was in-person socializing, as there was really no arena for it to occur naturally anymore. Without being forced to interact with others your energy shot to record levels for a while before mellowing out again. You weren’t sure if it was the removal of the monotonous and tedious work that did more for you or the removal of the social expectations attached to it.

However this left you somewhat socially starved, as you always were the talkative type and now had a very limited outlet for all that conversation. Since your partner moved in with you you found such relief not having to carry through even the relatively work free everyday of unemployment alone. As previously mentioned it really was hard enough dealing with existence, and having someone close by really helped with that. However they were only around sometimes, and a lot of time the screaming silence of the apartment walls became truly haunting. You needed to find a way to fill in these blanks with something, and most things were at this point very draining. Even the activity of writing which you so enjoyed took unavailable energy, which made you lethargic and apathetic. But in offloading part of the conversation onto a second party, you could get as much, or more, out of writing as you put in.

Not having the energy to carry the baggage of an existing friendship you opted to look online for new people to reach out to. In so doing you met the person who would come to dominate your socializing outside of that with your partner. While that story may be best reserved for your memory, it sure put you into a tumultuous time emotionally. While no longer socially starved there were still times in a day, like as you were writing this first post, where you felt in need to communicate with something. Having often turned inwards for this contemplation, it felt so different spilling your inner truths to another person. Writing essays long texts to someone about nothings, just to know they would at some point read it. As long as you got to do this, you thought, you may just be happy here at home, maybe you are fine like this.

Fear 🔗

This blog concept is a shoddy excuse for a pen name really. It wouldn’t take someone with the least bit of OSINT skill to find out all kinds of identifying information and make this silly moniker vanish. You knew you couldn’t speak completely freely here, but that kind of boundary keeping might well be worth working on. Besides, you are no stranger to vulnerability before strangers. You hoped there may well be an audience out there for what you wanted to do on this platform, although having no interest in advertising it. You felt resolute in not monetizing or attempting to commodify your work here, leading to you discarding all fineries. You have lately gotten a fair few compliments on your writing and you’re scared to have those set your expectations for your future too high. You were as scared of being discovered as you are of not being discovered, truly whatever outcome this has carries great potential but that charge was also terrifying to think of. To imagine getting someone writing you about the contents of something posted here felt strange. Like an intimate and guarded version of yourself colliding. They may or may not be used to hearing these thoughts from you, they may be further away from you socially than you’re used to when talking about this. You may need to be more careful in sharing this handle with others, as it may become a liability. Not that you are planning on sharing all the contents of your soul, but just the idea of having someone look at you from behind a one-sided mirror is in and of itself unsettling, no matter how much you got to choose your outfit first.

Future 🔗

I hope wherever you are when reading this is a good and stable place for you to be. From where you were sitting and writing this, the future did look bright. Perhaps so bright you were blinded by the light and had a hard time seeing what was in it. But foresight never was a particularly strong side for you, since things usually turned out in your favour anyways. The server that this is hosted on will hopefully live for a while longer even without your interaction. You knew you wanted to write your little heart out since a while back, and hopefully in posting this there would be less of a barrier to beat. Hopefully looking back at this there is a line of other texts and ideas made manifest. In knowing that there could be such an outcome was in its own way inspiring.

To spite perfection 🔗

More and more ideas are coming to your mind as you were wrapping up here, still scared that this would be too short of a text. Afraid that, in an almost megalomaniacal sense, the entire world would find this and find it utterly boring. That this genuine reflection of you was given a fair chance and rejected was not only a real possibility but to you a probably outcome. But the entire idea was to spite that, to look into your own perfectionist pride and disregard it. There is a time and a place for lofty idealism, for polish and editing, for prose and your regular obtuse writing. This is not that time, this time you managed to look past that and put this text into the world. Running on four hours less sleep than you usually need, this is what your first brush stroke looked like. You really hope this pans out this time, into what you don’t know, but anything is better than an empty canvas.