Are we back to blogging now?
Is that a thing we're doing?
Hey, sorry for the “two updates in a single day” thing, but it’s Wednesday, which is when my podcast comes out, and also I’m trying to build up something no publishers can touch so I don’t have to rely on them for money anymore, and that means I have to get more proactive about Substack and whatnot. Following on the Substack app and turning on notifications will make you NOT get emails. Substack really needs to just give creators the option to send out a weekly digest instead of forcing us to bombard you with emails and notifications every time we post something, but that hasn’t happened yet, so here we are. All I can do is say “sorry” again. I am becoming more Canadian with each passing day.
Dark Wizard Elon Musk succeeded in taking a giant nepobaby Nazi shit all over our previous modes of social media, which is annoying in the short term but is probably going to work out to be a good thing long-term. I’m not sure humankind was ever meant to communicate 240 characters at a time. I think short messages make us lazy and dull. Or more lazy and dull than we were already, as a matter of course, which is saying something because we were a remarkably ding-dongish species before social media came along.
Hey guys, do you remember back when everybody was blogging? Like, Livejournal days? That feels like it was so long ago now. Livejournal feels so innocent and cute when you think about the weaponized-disinformation, government-destroying, cult-indoctrinating horse shit social media has become. But everything old is new again, and also everything comes to an end. I fervently hope we’re seeing the end of the Great Social Media Experiment and are moving toward more personable, engaging, more deeply-connecting modes of self-expression on the internet. Besides, I’m better with long forms. People find me marginally more interesting when I can chew the fat and conjure up a little narrative thread somewhere.
No narrative thread in this post, though—just me rambling. I’m very tired. I got my ass kicked by my crummy mental health last week and I’m still feeling kind of sad about it. I’m getting over it, though. In the midst of my many frustrations with my career, I’m teasing out ways to find happiness and more definite gratitude. That’s not always easy. Ego is how we pilot our meat suits; ego is a necessary and even fundamental component of the human experience, despite the ways it’s demonized in “wellness” spaces. But I have to find some way of making my ego take a back seat in my career. It still hurts me, very much, that I don’t get to write under my real name (at least, nothing that is recognized by the literature world) and it still hurts me, very much, to know that I’m significantly better at this work than most people who are doing the job, yet I don’t get the kind of recognition, support, or pay those other people get. And because I know how the publishing world works, I know that’s not likely to ever change at this point. It could change, but it’s not likely, and that makes me feel despairing and unappreciated far too often.
Anyway. Maybe this resurgence of interest in blogging among the culture at large will create some path for me to build what I need to build away from publishers. To find an audience that likes what I do and wants my words, my imagery, my unique take on things, so I don’t have to work inside the publishing model anymore.
Or maybe I’ll continue to be an obscurity and/or an anonymity, depending on whether you’re looking at the real me or my pen name (which has never felt like me.) In that case, I’ll still have to find some way of being okay with my frustrations and injustices. That’s hard to do when all my life I’ve just wanted to be seen and loved, and I’m still not there yet, despite all my effort and this marginal success.