Recently I posted this on Substack, the first post on the platform I've willingly made in a long time. If you haven't read it yet, go do that and come back. I think my point is pretty simple and straightforward: it's nice to have your own personal website, free of the constraints of any sort of predetermined structure besides the way HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work.
The post, though, felt like more of a sort of declaration than a fully fleshed-out blog post, per se. There's a lot more I've been thinking about... the initial piece didn't capture nearly all of my thoughts on the subject, so, bored and a little too mentally amped, I've decided to go deeper on here, my actual blog.
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Some background...
After I finished undergrad, didn't get into the MFA I'd've killed for, and unwillingly relocated back to California, I was thrust into what I often very dismissively refer to as my "failson years" (no job, bad brain, social isolation in the suburbs...). The one thing that kept me from completely losing it was my newfound discovery of the concept of website-as-toy, of DIY-ing my own space online. Spurred on by artists and thinkers such as Allison Parrish, Laurel Schwulst, and Everest Pipkin, I slowly taught myself to code not as a professional goal but as an exploration into how I could play with ideas I'd been ruminating over in a completely new way. A new set of tools, if you will. I began with HTML and CSS and, craving more interactivity with my work, eventually force-fed myself a bunch of JavaScript tutorials (shoutout FreeCodeCamp, dear god). For a while I was really having fun.
When did I lose the juice? I suppose when it did become a professional goal. I didn't listen to a single person who told me that oftentimes coding is fun until you do it professionally – sure, I thought dismissively, maybe for you. Well, I'm not actually built that different, and for a long time I couldn't bring myself to even breathe in the direction of a code editor outside of work, associating writing code with the stress of falling behind on deadlines and worrying I was going to disappoint my coworkers. I no longer saw it as a medium, just a source of anxiety. It really made me sad.
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It's hard to pinpoint any one thing that brought me back, and I do think it happened over the span of quite a lot of time and because of no singular reason. Shuffling up my career certainly helped – going from software engineer to distressingly aimless unemployed layabout to MLIS student has radically changed and broadened what skills and technologies I spend my time on.¹
My social media habits also reoriented massively, both by force and by visceral need. Like I said in my Substack post, I'm not gone from every single form of social media and probably never will be, but I deleted my guilty-pleasure semi-anonymous Twitter recently as a last-ditch attempt to stanch the doomscrolling that was very notably affecting my mental health.² Instagram has lost its sheen beyond keeping up with friends and occasional events, and I've never had the patience for short-form video content, which is probably a blessing of sorts, so no TikTok or Insta reels for me.
So what?, I'm sure you're thinking. Understandable. I suppose what I really should go into is what I'm desperately attempting to replace my scroll-time with. I do like to read and go for long walks and work on my writing a fair amount. I'm trying to figure out how the fuck to relearn to draw. Real analogue shit. But I do still like online! I love the internet! Enter my website. Enter coding stuff because I can again. Enter reading more long-form pieces. Enter making new Wikipedia and Are.na accounts. Enter actually learning stuff and exploring and having fun. Enter not wanting to blow my brains out barely two minutes after opening my phone, at least most of the time, I hope.
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Like I mentioned in my Substack post, I've also really gotten into curating a "digital garden" – I realize that sounds kind of ~tender, but, you know what, sure. I'd rather have a gentle and peaceful time online at this point. The subreddit (of course there's a goddamn subreddit) defines digital gardens as "personal wikis, digital spaces of notes & thoughts." (I initially thought a personal wiki was a wiki about yourself and had the most self-involved idea on the planet for a minute.)
My personal site is certainly my "main" digital garden, and I do tend to it like one, adding links to stuff I think is cool and updating my little "news" section, yes, but also I've discovered the fun of making pages that aren't accessible by any links on the site. I wrote out my whole life story, but you have to ask me for the URL if you want it. There's some invisible short fiction on there, and a couple of maps I coded in Python. It's fun to have little online hidden trap doors, easter eggs, whatever you want to call it.³
I've also really enjoyed my foray back into Are.na – I'm already hoarding PDFs the way I did back in my aaaaaarg days, diving into weird philosophies and forms of technology that have me scratching my head, and there are so many charts. I love charts. I've also recently made a new Wikipedia account and have been saving my favorite wormhole articles.⁴ In high school I used to call this form of exploration "doing the internet" – and, sure, it's different now from the tail end of the Geocities sites and individual forums sixteen-year-old Will would lurk, but it's not totally gone. You just have to put a bit more work into looking under rocks, peeling back the veil.
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Being "online" for me often felt like work solely because I let quite a lot of my emotional validation hinge on whether I was getting (positive) attention on social media and, as such, put immense amounts of effort into posting things people would like. People loved a self-denigrating shitpost and didn't give much of a shit about a link to something interesting I'd found, so, fuck it. The former, again. Brute-forcing my way away from that hasn't been easy or fun – in fact it's felt a bit isolating – but now if I find something cool I can just put it on my personal site or save it on Are.na or yammer about it on here or whatever with no expectation of people paying attention.⁵ In fact, if one person a month looks at my website, that's fine. I just hope they enjoy their time browsing it.
Reading this post over, I kind of found myself thinking, "wow, this is just really rambly bullshit about myself." Then I remember that I am literally posting on blogspot dot com, emphasis on blog. If there is one thing I would really like to work on about myself as time passes, it's my pervasive fear that every creative endeavor I undertake, every expression of myself is somehow being done "wrong," despite always following that up immediately with "what the hell does wrong even entail, Willem?". And a part of this involves reorienting the way I spend my time on the internet, curating my own online space, continuing to have fun working on little projects, exploring and developing new interests in things I come across – rather than, you know, scrolling myself into a bitter insanity.
Will I keep it up? I really, really hope so. As long as I can keep from getting sucked into that everlasting vortex of "bad feelings -> go on social media to numb self -> worse feelings", I think I'll be fine. And I'll keep adding stuff to my website, maybe make it into a labyrinth of sorts. Just do not let me fucking log back onto Twitter.
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¹I was too depressed during my period of unemployment to make or learn just about anything, which admittedly still kind of annoys me. I do know Python and R now, though.
²Blah blah doomscrolling is bad, we all know. I don't really have anything groundbreaking to say about it, just that it was doing a number on me.
³You can email me if you'd like to see any of these, but kindly don't share them if you do.
⁴I have been lax on saving. Currently, in order: Georges Perec, metro station (not the band), suicide (also not the band), Novaya Zemlya effect, Bear Island (Svalbard).
⁵It kind of feels like quitting smoking – I miss nicotine insanely but I do also feel far, far better without it.
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