i need to get better at coming up with titles

Until starting this site project, I would save things until they were fully realized – often for so long that I forget they’re there – so they could be posted at just the right time. One recurring theme behind most things I did before turning 30 is worrying that I’m running out of time, which after turning 30 became accepting that “just the right time” is never guaranteed. Given that context and given how my mind works and how quickly I tend to put things off to the side, I have decided that it would be best for me to not stop writing. This is a very Harriet-the-Spy sentiment, but I’m not about to invalidate or infantilize this newfound want to express myself. Besides, Harriet the Spy transcends time and is not a bad movie.

One of the most daunting challenges I was not looking forward to facing in getting this site started was the same challenge I have faced in starting and navigating new social media platforms: establishing myself through drafting up another about-me section. Previous about-lines have included such gems as “without me, it’s just aweso” and “a quiet person with quite a few things to say”. I then spent the last year and a half of my twenties under the line “almost 30, kind of flirty, sort of thriving” – now, having fully manifested all three of these (which I’m just as surprised about as you are), I feel the need to come up with something else. That will come with time, I guess.

The original intent of my first site was to help serve in part as a guide “for the small-town people with big-city aspirations that want to take care of themselves so they can better care for others around them, on a budget and in the face of limited resources, and documenting everything else that happens in between in their own personal style.” Having moved to Anchorage in 2013, most of that purpose has been defeated.

Until recently, I was worried that to write anything at this point in my life would come across as unsolicited opinions and would show the same sense of entitlement seen from dude-bros butting in and trolling conversations, or mansplaining hot-button topics in efforts to impress people at parties. Part of me still feels like that’s how I’m coming across by writing so much at a time, but I’m working on feeling that less.

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months looking at my old writings and marveling at how my writing has changed over 8 years. There were some very clear influences then, both in subject and delivery. I don’t think I ever established it in writing but back then I definitely worded my writings with the intention of being voiced like JPMetz on YouTube, especially from her earliest videos, dating back to the late 2000s.

The late 2000s was also the dawning of my first era of skin care, where I flocked to the Body Shop because it was familiar and featured full lines of products that fed into my still-present compulsion to have one of everything. I would also buy from whichever indie brands were promoted by YouTubers I was following at the time. Through buying so many things, in my mind I would become that same YouTuber even by just a little bit, if not a guru myself. The best example of this I can think of is at one point I wrote an entire post about an elaborate Body Shop tea-tree skin care routine that also incorporated Michelle Phan’s iQQU acne serum. Looking back now, having not fully mastered the basics of skin care at that time, the routine and products really weren’t worth the time or the money. My experience as of today proves that skin care is equal parts external products and nutrition - but that’s another writing for another day.

My writing back in those days was also wildly self-deprecating, especially through apologizing upfront for not being interesting enough to garner the views or read counts I wanted. I think casually hating on everything, including and especially ourselves, was just in vogue back when I first started posting writings. This was also during what I think of as the golden age of YouTube, which was about when Apple released laptops with built-in webcams and iMovie. For a time I also made YouTube videos of my own as sort of video versions or extensions of content I would have produced in writing.

There was an incident with a forum called Something Awful back in 2009 or so where forum goons posted a video to their site in which they trolled one of my YouTube videos and brutalized me through commentary over my original video. In turn, users from everywhere came to leave hateful comments on my channel page and all of the videos I had up at the time. This incident really contributed to my feeling like I’m living in the public eye and a constant need to give context in hopes to prove why I made videos or content that I did. For each time they asked why any part of the video they chose mattered, I wanted to give an answer. This also brought about the idea that nothing I produced was good enough to share with anyone, despite how good I felt about it. It wasn’t until a writing in 2015 that I pointed out “how admirable it is to watch anyone talk about something that they’re passionate about, creating a positivity that’s contagious”. I asked this then and I’ll ask it again in sharing my writings now: who am I to deny that of anyone?

According to my old writings, I was told by English professors that my writing was either too vague and circular, or too wordy to present an idea concisely. This, combined with what happened with Something Awful and then previous thinking that I need to be brief to be effective, led me to title writings from my first site that chronicled personal life events as “tl;dr” – internet-speak for “too long; didn’t read” – downplaying these events as unimportant. It’s this kind of suppression and internalization that over time led me and continues to lead me to forget how much I endure, in this case especially over the course of 2011 to 2017.

For brevity’s sake I’m not going to try and fit all six of those years of writing into one post. Until I get a feel for how my writing is received, I’m going to hold off to gauge how much I should share at a time and how much people need to know.

There were a couple more directions that I wanted to take with this entry, but in any event, I concede that those English professors would still be right today. The more I write and shake the cobwebs off, the more the ideas and words start flowing. What might start as a couple bullets or sentences here and there can potentially break off into an entire post on its own – and some ideas have already. Stay tuned for more to come, I guess.