This is really about nothing in particular.
I don’t know if there are really any codified rules out there governing the usefulness of blogs, or a secret cabal that enforces the quality and reliability of blog posts; I just know that I’ve never started a blog before because I live in constant fear of them. For someone like me, enshrining your thoughts and ideas on an infinitely sharable and replicable shard of the Internet, regardless of how miniscule and insignificant that shard is, is incredibly daunting; not only does that open your once safe and happy little creations up to public scrutiny, it immortalizes them. If you speak in error it can and will be remembered. Mistakes can be corrected, but they leave wounds that don’t heal. You will become “that guy”. This will be “this blog”.
This, of course, is an example of paranoid lunacy, but so often in my life has the response for my mistakes been swift punishment that I have long since forgotten the use of error as an arbiter of personal growth. Now, I just live in fear. Fear of being corrected. Fear of inevitable ignorance. Fear of embarrassment and shame. I am at the point where I understand the futility in wanting to always be correct, but these backwards trenches are already dug deep into my brain. I struggle to stumble over them, to reach some nirvana in the realm of the incorrect and unknown, as I secret away all my creative endeavors. They are too rough, too purely of my flawed self to be seen by others, to be picked apart for their shortcomings and inaccuracies. Yes. I have been to therapy.
My new therapy will now be this blog.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” says you, from your hypothetical space you speak from, to which, in this hypothetical conversation, I would wryly look upon you in reply, retorting with some malformed comeback under my breath as I tremble and walk away. I will hypothetically cry in the shower later that hypothetical night.
What is wrong with me is that I am, as an unrepentant critic and overall ass-hole, deathly afraid of criticism. But I’m tired of just leeching off of the creativity of others, picking apart their creations with my greasy fingers as I “expose” their “inadequacies.” I want to become a more positive person. I want to open myself up to making mistakes, doing things the wrong way, and being okay with that. I want to make something flawed and stupid, and show it to everyone, and when they recoil in disgust I want to take that reaction and drink it, grow from it. I want to use this space to be weird, be myself, be uninhibited. Yes, this is all rather insignificant and embarrassing for you to read, I’m sure. Please tell me about it.
I don’t know how you got here, or why you decided to read this. I’m glad you’re here, I suppose. This is the blog.
