god, this week fucking sucked (cw for health, weight and disordered eating talk, emetophobia)

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this week, i thought about shaving my head.

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i've been on the internet since 1999. to save you the math, i'll tell you we got america online when i was seven years old, and i am 32 years old now, which means i have spent the majority of my life online. i have been Posting (and Posting Thru It) ever since my aunt and uncle brought us their old desktop pc, set me up with an email address, and set me loose. 

granted, this was not the world's greatest idea? because i was seven years old and on the internet pretty much unsupervised* from day one of my online access. but nothing that bad happened, right? i bounced from message boards (aol harry potter roleplay, neopets general roleplay) to xanga to myspace to facebook to livejournal to tumblr twitter insta bluesky the list will never end. and now i'm here. hello, dreamwidth!

all this to say, i am not new to Posting. i love to Post, love to have a little thought and pop it into a text box and send it off across the internet to the void or to a captive audience or a combination of both. but it's been a while since i've blogged, and i do think there is a distinction between the two, posting and blogging. 

posting is for quick-bites, a tweet or an insta story or some dumb comment in the discord group chat; something that you just kind of fire off quickly. you might expand it into a thread or a conversation, but it's a shorter form and has a shorter shelf-life. this is fine! but then again, i have such adhd that i have approximately 400 thoughts a minute and cannot be tweeting that often or everyone would be so, so sick of the inside of my head. (this is why i journal on pen and paper separately and privately now, for example. stream of consciousness, baby!)

blogging, to me, feels like a different animal. i used to post long entries to xanga** (does anyone here know xanga? it was like my lj before lj, beginning around age 11, if you can believe it) about my day, my thoughts, my feelings, etc. caused youth group drama, even. then years later i migrated to lj. lj was like personal blogging but also had some fandom aspects? my best friend at the time was always making graphics and posting about theatre, and i would post entries and photos about our little adventures around our small towns.

(actually, it's been almost 15 years to the day since my last lj post -- the last one visible to me outside of login, that is. i posted on jan 16, 2010, about wanting to start a new lj and needing help coming up with a username. ["Any ideas at all would be appreciated... I kind of want something that reflects all of the odd things I love, like scifi and Joss Whedon, and Broadway and Sondheim... yknow?"] *** )

later, i would share some sort of blogging and personal-life updates on tumblr, but then there came a rash of people weirdly reblogging personal posts, and that made me incredibly nervous, so i just kind of stopped talking about myself too much out of anxiety and developed some weird stage fright about it. (and overall tumblr is a different creature than it was when i joined around 2009, but that may be a post for a different time.)

anyway. when i saw some friends trying to Bring Blogging Back and make the internet a place again (h/t my beloved alice) i started looking at dreamwidth and got so, so nostalgic for the era of Personal Blogging, casually writing something a little more longform than a tweet thread and just posting it to share with friends, and reading their blogs, and hearing about their lives in a longer and maybe in some ways more personal form than 240 characters or whatever. also there are (i assume) way fewer porn bots here. 

it's like -- okay. i have this problem where i constantly want to write, want to BE writing, want to put words together into sentences and have smart things or moving things or any things to say, but given the culture shift of online culture to, honestly, meanness and a desperate need to prove that anyone you disagree with is Wrong, Morally, i have developed, as i mentioned, a horrible stage fright. i can't write personally and publicly because the stakes are so high and i am so scared. i can't write fiction because what if i do it Wrong and i get Called Out? in this way i have built a tidy little brick wall for myself between my brain and the keyboard in any meaningful sense. 

but i was describing to crowe and kit**** the reasons i was drawn toward starting a dreamwidth and posting here, and i realized that part of it is that, while i do care about what i write and share here, it just, like. it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter! i can do this without trying to, i don't know, build a following and career off of it or whatever. it's just for fun. and i've been afraid to write anything longer than a tweet outside of my journal for so long that i'm badly rusty at it, and i think if i just sit down and practice via dw for a while, it might help unblock me. that's my hope, at least.

so: there you have it. i am here to try and let myself connect words together into sentences into paragraphs again in the hope that slowly i will feel more capable of writing, period, and can work on some things i've had stewing in my brain for a long time. 

that's not to mean that i don't or won't care about what i post here, because i do want things to flow and make sense and hopefully be interesting or funny***** or thoughtful. but i'm trying not to put pressure on myself, because that's how i shut down and end up doing nothing, out of fear. you understand.

well, that's all i have to say right now, on this topic at least. how do people sign off on these things? are we signing off? can anyone hear me?

[aol log-off voice] goodbye.

--

* this caused me a lot of anxiety after a while so i asked my parents to put a parent lock on my account because i was worried i would access something Inappropiate. then they got sick of unblocking websites for me and gave me their passwords so i could unblock them myself. sometimes i would log into their account and change my aol account to a Kid or Teen account, which had different permissions, and then i'd get bored or annoyed and change it back. you see where the morality ocd began stirring now, don't you.

** i also tried to get a roleplay group off the ground on xanga. "what was the setting, jay?" oh i'm so glad you asked. performance arts boarding school. i know.

*** i know, part deux.

**** this makes me sound like i have animal friends who live in the forest. and i guess i kind of do! but kit is not, like, the fox kind of kit. or a cat kind. kit is just kit. 

***** i was going to say "funny sometimes" but i need applause to live.