i am here to climb cringe mountain

I have been thinking quietly to myself that I would like to write a bit more, for a while now. But thinking quietly to myself is a surefire way to never do anything. I am many things but self-motivated is not one of them. I am at my best when I have some form, however loose, of social accountability. I have resisted this fact about myself for over twenty years but I can’t go on this way.

So I mentioned to one friend, just one, that I was thinking of writing a blog, and not even 24 hours later I am writing this. It’s astonishing. The friend has to do nothing but exist in this scenario. I don’t understand it, but it’s the only way I work.

a potted history

When I was a kid, I wrote a lot, but I didn’t count it as ‘writing’ because if I didn’t do it, I’d have simply gone insane. I started by writing these long, rambling poems or ‘songs’ which I would post on my actual Facebook as a tween. God help me, I wasn’t bullied for them which I suspect is either because everyone took pity on me, or because no one was ever curious enough to actually read them.

After my prolific Facebook Notes tweendom, I graduated to twitter, where I was a member of the #illhueminati, a group I still don’t really understand the purpose of. But I was a member because that meant you could get interactions from other members, and I needed to feel seen. A couple of my tweets / ‘poems’ got like 10k views which in those days actually did feel like a lot, but all it really did was give me a high to chase. I also posted some poems on some other websites but I genuinely can’t remember which ones, nor the subject of the poems; I like to think of them growing lichen in the back-annals of the internet somewhere.

Then, after a brief hiatus from oversharing on the internet, during 2020 (which was a Bad Time for many, myself included) I started posting my poems on instagram. I don’t know why I can never go back to the same place, and I don’t know what that says for the future of my neocities but these questions are too existential to deal with here. My instagram poetry era was one of my most successful, insofar as I built a community and had people I would actually have sustained and meaningful conversations with. However, I also left abruptly after promising myself I would one day publish a chapbook. Not sure if it was that I put too much pressure on myself, or just that the world opened up and I had other things to do.

But I didn’t count any of that as ‘being a writer’ or anything, it was simply writing some weird things and putting them on the internet, anonymously. I never overthought it, and so it poured out of me.

errrrm so what now?

By contrast, now I am an adult with a real job and a Personal Brand that I think about more than I am proud to admit. Which, by the way, isn’t actually very often, but the fact I think about it at all feels like a moral failing.

I don’t know when it happened, but one day, the idea of posting weird things on the internet started to feel like it might send my world crashing down. The idea that I might post a poem and it somehow get attributed back to me gave me such bad stage fright that I’ve just not said anything at all.

I also only ever posted under a pseudonym or anonymously. I feel like I am at a stage where I want to reclaim my voice - but at the same time, I don’t want anyone to think anything bad of me. Those two things can’t really co-exist, I get that, but I also need to make myself feel safe enough to write something down and put it somewhere - hence this website.

“Oh but couldn’t you just write things and not put them anywhere?” No, for the aforementioned Loose Social Pressure reasons, and also just because I would like something to look back through that is not my laptop’s internal folders.

so what is this?

I’m not sure. The only things I know are that I want to write some longer reflections than I have done historically. I think I always used to get my kicks from writing academic essays (genuinely) and I didn’t realise what a hole there was. Or maybe there isn’t and I’ll hate this and never do it again. I don’t know.

You (whoever you are???) can probably expect some stuff on music and some stuff on life. I might start hosting my song demos online somewhere and putting links here too but that feels like a bigger step. Let’s start with baby steps and work our way up cringe mountain.

xoxo