(no subject)

So I'm back again. And I've made this promise a few times, to update more, and I always failed before. Something feels different now, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll translate into activity. I'm learning that once I'm past the 'I'm back!' post, thinking of things to post about gets harder.

That struggle to make my own posts is something that's been on my heart for a while. Dreamwidth has been here while I was straying off to other pastures, but I haven't been using it because at some point I stopped thinking anything I made that wasn't fic or art mattered. And I used to be really active on Livejournal, the vast majority of what I was posting wasn't fic or art. When I joined Tumblr, the most novel thing about Tumblr was the option to easily broadcast other people's words to my followers. That changed my habits almost overnight, because a) it was popular and b) it made posting my own thoughts simultaneously feel like an inconvenience to everyone else and dangerous. Tumblr's firehose made it feel like saying anything was drawing a giant spotlight to me. Back in the days when it was extremely busy, everything I say on that platform felt performative. I'm a comedian. I'm an activist. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. But I also saw people saying what mattered to me in a much more impactful way. I used to dash off a Livejournal post without really thinking about how much it would resonate with anyone outside of my direct friend group, because reblogs didn't exist; the likelihood of someone outside my direct followers seeing that post was vanishingly small.

The end result was me second-guessing every post I make. Everything gets carefully packaged for easy consumption on Tumblr. I have a multitude of drafts where I'm angry and hurt, impatient and annoyed, but it doesn't get posted because it's not intended for anyone but the handful of active followers who give a damn, but it could feasibly get picked up by anybody. And I want the people who know me to have the capacity to weigh in, but I don't want or need someone who's never met me having an opinion on how I see the world today.

And I've been thinking a lot lately about how compartmentalized I am. And how damned performative that Tumblr is. It's gotten a bit better as Tumblr has both gotten quieter and older, but it's still a bit I commit to when I post something of my own. I don't have any pretensions that my perspective has any value to anyone other than me and people who care about me. I just want to have a point of view again, one that's mine, and stop feeling like I can't make messy personal posts because it's just going to be noise clogging up other people's dashes.

So hopefully, I'll be back. Because I think I need to do this more. I think I lost my voice in the habit of using other people's voices and other people's perspectives instead of using my own. Writing blog posts feels like hard work right now, but I've been learning that a lot of the things I used to do are hard right now because I haven't been doing them, among other reasons. And in a world where ai slop is gobbling up the landscape and everything feels less and less human, just taking some fucking time to make something of my own in a quiet place where a few people can see it and maybe connect sounds pretty fucking nice.

I'm so tired. I'm sad, and I'm exhausted, and I have so much unprocessed grief about the last five years (and the four before that). None of that is going to get better by doomscrolling.