Old school blogging in the age of influencers

I think what’s stopping me from posting here as much as I feel like I’d like to, is primarily a sort of social media pressure. It sounds so tacky to even say that, but it’s really true. I have this blog, I love the name and ridiculous latin tag line. I love writing and am really craving that release, it’s cathartic and creative for me, more than anything else I do, and yet, I hesitate to post. Why? Because I don’t have a “brand”, because this place is all over the place. This place, incidentally, means my brainspace as much as my blog, my hobbies as much as my atelier, my plans as much as my planner, it’s all all over the place. Perhaps I need to strive for the authenticity the influencers claim (but how much of it do they deliver?) and just accept, and lay out for the world, the random, ecclectic, eccentric space I inhabit. Perhaps it won’t help me sell the cute clothes I make, or get followers on instagram, or whatever else it can maybe do for others, but it can at least free up some space in my brain, let me reach out into the vastness of the interwebs and make a connection or two. And if not, maybe at least I can get my ideas in order and feel saner for that.

It’s been a theme in my life that I haven’t had very defined goals – a gifted (slight) underachiever with way more ideas for projects than time to complete them, a 5w4 with way more plans than energy to put into them, it’s been a sort of defence mechanism. I have so many things going on that eventually some of them get completed and I can let people think that they’re things I set out to achieve, but like when I used to pull off an A on a project I’d done over lunch before handing it in in the afternoon because I’d completely forgotten its existence until then, it’s much more accurate to say that they’re just hings that happened to get done at that time. I appear self-driven because I like working on things on my own – but mostly I just like to experiment and am happy to share what comes of it if it’s not a complete disaster (spoiler: it rarely is in the kitchen, but the rest of it is less certain). As I get older, I’m more aware of my nerodivergence. I had a beautiful bubble of similar minded friends through high school and university (including Kyle’s years in grad school) that sheltered me and let me be odd without seeming so (primary school was not great, but I try not to think about it too much, and then I had my delightfully odd siblings anyway). As I spend more time in the “real world” and on social media it’s becoming apparent that goal settings and having a clear purpose for doing things is more common than haphazard experimentation. I’ve tried a few times to write out goals for this blog, for my shop, sensible things to do, but they just don’t work. I just don’t know, and honestly… I kind of like it that way.

Of course, part of me longs for stability – a decade of blissfully playing “follow the funding” across Canada and Western Europe being gatecrashed by forced immobility for two years has shifted priorities a bit, as have some illnesses, deaths and births in the family in the same period. Really though, what I’d like is just enough stability to relax in – like the way a poem needs to have a meter to fully expand into. Absolute creative freedom leads to uncertainty, form contains and channels creation into something transcendant. I think that’s what I’m looking for as I poke around the darker corners of my memories, as I try to sort out how this gorgeous brain of mine is wired together. I’m not looking for a goal or a game plan, for a list of objectives or best practices, I don’t want tips to grow my business if they’ll crush my soul, I don’t need to know in advance what my end will be – but I need to find a form, a poem to contain… me.