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Sep. 9th, 2021 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yvonThe past is on my mind a lot recently. There are a couple of sides to this: nostalgia, and comparisons of my current situation to my past self and I think they both need a lot of unpacking.
Back in May I had... a breakdown of sorts in which I realised I had been working myself too hard, I fell into a creative block that I hadn't felt anything like for a long time. Over the next few months I made a lot of efforts to re-centre myself and it mostly worked. I do feel better, if not completely. One of the decisions I made after taking an official holiday was to semi-quit twitter - I'd been trying this for a while, finding ways to check it less and only use it for posting art or other things that were really positive but it's so hard to keep up any usage of it without it affecting me deeply. I do still post on occasion and it's the main place to get my art seen, and I am always so grateful for the response it gets on there. But since the end of June I haven't been reading my timeline at all and I feel so much better for it.
The more time that passes, the more I find it so hard to "exist" online. It's strange and painful as someone for whom the internet was everything growing up. It allowed me to discover myself and form all of my most significant relationships. But, it's getting to the stage where spending time on any social website definitely does more harm than good and I can no longer keep denying it and trying to keep using them without hurting myself.
I've been sinking myself into nostalgic things, and while some of this is just stuff that I think is cool or beautiful or interesting and it's enjoyable to remember, it's also a way of considering my current position and where I want to go. Something I always come back to and find fascinating about old technology is how is restrictions influenced what it produced and how it was used, and pushed innovation. Mostly in the form of video games and how technical limitations formed stylistic choices in art and music and game design, but also in areas such as web design and communication. I could talk for hours about that but it's not really what this post is intended to be about.
Last night I found someone's tumblr that hadn't been updated since 2012, and as I went through it even that relatively recent piece of internet history made me sad. I am certainly not romanticising that era entirely, or tumblr itself, but I was definitely still enjoying my time online back then. Things were changing, becoming faster-paced and tumblr's poor communication features were certainly a pain but I still found myself able to connect with people and consider it to be a kind of "home". It was still easy to find a divide between internet and fandom life and real life, a kind of sanctuary, but I no longer feel that to be the case.
These things are becoming more and more closely integrated and I am beginning to realise that if I want to preserve myself I need to force a step back. This is the first time in my life that I've felt this so strongly, after always being desperate to spend my free time online because it allowed an escape, I now find myself in this strange position where I need to escape from the internet instead, into the real world. It's strange and saddening and confusing, because so much of my identity has always revolved around being online.
I look to my younger self for direction sometimes, not only relating to this issue but other things, creative and artistic decisions. What would he think about what I'm doing? Would he be proud of the position I'm in? In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. That's the part that always feels most difficult. To disappoint your younger self feels uncomfortable, and sows the seeds of doubt. Should I really be doing this, if younger-me would consider what I'm doing to be boring or trite? There is a certain purity of self in childhood that I've found beneficial to look back on and hold on to, to centre myself, but on the other hand, as children we are ignorant. There are things we don't understand, or cannot foresee. If I am making a decision for reasons that are correct in the present, then surely, that should be enough? I can't hold myself accountable to the views of younger-me, who had no way to grasp the future situation he would find himself in. That would make no sense, and yet, it still feels wrong, like a disappointment. I don't know how to deal with this feeling but try to work towards a balance - or perhaps consider the idea that younger-me might not be so disappointed with my current decisions after all.
Back in May I had... a breakdown of sorts in which I realised I had been working myself too hard, I fell into a creative block that I hadn't felt anything like for a long time. Over the next few months I made a lot of efforts to re-centre myself and it mostly worked. I do feel better, if not completely. One of the decisions I made after taking an official holiday was to semi-quit twitter - I'd been trying this for a while, finding ways to check it less and only use it for posting art or other things that were really positive but it's so hard to keep up any usage of it without it affecting me deeply. I do still post on occasion and it's the main place to get my art seen, and I am always so grateful for the response it gets on there. But since the end of June I haven't been reading my timeline at all and I feel so much better for it.
The more time that passes, the more I find it so hard to "exist" online. It's strange and painful as someone for whom the internet was everything growing up. It allowed me to discover myself and form all of my most significant relationships. But, it's getting to the stage where spending time on any social website definitely does more harm than good and I can no longer keep denying it and trying to keep using them without hurting myself.
I've been sinking myself into nostalgic things, and while some of this is just stuff that I think is cool or beautiful or interesting and it's enjoyable to remember, it's also a way of considering my current position and where I want to go. Something I always come back to and find fascinating about old technology is how is restrictions influenced what it produced and how it was used, and pushed innovation. Mostly in the form of video games and how technical limitations formed stylistic choices in art and music and game design, but also in areas such as web design and communication. I could talk for hours about that but it's not really what this post is intended to be about.
Last night I found someone's tumblr that hadn't been updated since 2012, and as I went through it even that relatively recent piece of internet history made me sad. I am certainly not romanticising that era entirely, or tumblr itself, but I was definitely still enjoying my time online back then. Things were changing, becoming faster-paced and tumblr's poor communication features were certainly a pain but I still found myself able to connect with people and consider it to be a kind of "home". It was still easy to find a divide between internet and fandom life and real life, a kind of sanctuary, but I no longer feel that to be the case.
These things are becoming more and more closely integrated and I am beginning to realise that if I want to preserve myself I need to force a step back. This is the first time in my life that I've felt this so strongly, after always being desperate to spend my free time online because it allowed an escape, I now find myself in this strange position where I need to escape from the internet instead, into the real world. It's strange and saddening and confusing, because so much of my identity has always revolved around being online.
I look to my younger self for direction sometimes, not only relating to this issue but other things, creative and artistic decisions. What would he think about what I'm doing? Would he be proud of the position I'm in? In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. That's the part that always feels most difficult. To disappoint your younger self feels uncomfortable, and sows the seeds of doubt. Should I really be doing this, if younger-me would consider what I'm doing to be boring or trite? There is a certain purity of self in childhood that I've found beneficial to look back on and hold on to, to centre myself, but on the other hand, as children we are ignorant. There are things we don't understand, or cannot foresee. If I am making a decision for reasons that are correct in the present, then surely, that should be enough? I can't hold myself accountable to the views of younger-me, who had no way to grasp the future situation he would find himself in. That would make no sense, and yet, it still feels wrong, like a disappointment. I don't know how to deal with this feeling but try to work towards a balance - or perhaps consider the idea that younger-me might not be so disappointed with my current decisions after all.
