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Friday 21 April 2017

Would You Just... Tidy Your Blog?

Well hello there. I feel tentatively nice today. Mug of Earl Grey and my good jumper and Moondance playing on Spotify, and a few clear hours to write before work.

Spent last night fiddling with my blog, its layout, for the first time in forever. Only to get the fonts from the desktop version displaying on mobile, involving a mooch around Google looking for tutorials, some light editing of HTML, then adding lines to the CSS thing, and finally a bit of experimentation with font sizes, but still that feeling whenever I get anything to work on a computer, that I am literally Neo, can bend the very concept of code to my will. So, feeling confident, I went on to add sharing buttons to the bottom of every post -- with my mind! Well, no, by installing an add-on, with my fingers. But I controlled those fingers with my mind!

Anyway, it took most of the evening, and it was a positive, active step, an act of will to push me away from depression's orbit.

It got me thinking about why I put so little effort into the design of my blog, and I reckon the answer has a lot to do with self-esteem. I mean, I know very little about coding or CSS or graphic design, but then there's plenty I know nothing about that I go out and voraciously read up on, and I did do an ostensible computing degree at uni, and loads of people who started out knowing even less than me have ended up creating much better blogs.

So I think in large part it is the feeling that I can't fail if I don't try. Which is ludicrous, because the only true failure in life is that of never trying -- well, that and, obviously, death -- but still, it is a pervasive feeling. Put zero effort into something that is expressive of who you are and no one can tell you it is bad -- or rather, the badness will only be a reflection of your lack of effort, which approach you chose, rather than your innate lack of skill, which you can do nothing about. And so you hold the secret fervid hope of your talent, your perhaps beauty, somewhere deep inside, but it is so fragile, so tiny, will so probably be crushed by the world, that you never bring it out into the open, you slouch along instead putting in minimum effort acting like you don't care getting back only what you surely (please, please no) deserve.

My use of the word "beauty" back there is probably apposite. The whole thing is like turning up to a party in baggy sweats and big hoodie, with hair hidden, shoes old and scruffy, no makeup on -- yes, let's say you're a girl, overweight, with limp hair tied back, no makeup, drab clothes. You melt into the background, get swallowed by the walls. All the boys pass their gaze over you without pausing. But this is exactly what you want. Christ, the shame of smooshing yourself into a dress, your belly rolling out of the sides, showing your knobbly knees, your florid, plucked forearms, plastering on blusher like you believe you have the right, like you want to be judged alongside those floating sirens serenading at the front of the room, to think you're one of them, not a horrid icky goblin creature from Neptune, to have buff Jason, he of the chiselled jaw and taut rectus abdominus -- to have him swagger over to you and cry, "My God, have you... have you tried to look... beautiful?" And for everyone to fall silent, to point, then to shriek, cabbages to be thrown, for you to be hauled into the stocks or kicked down into the mud from where you'll have to grovel for the rest of eternity. No, better to crawl by choice, to keep your head down, to fade into nothingness, to stay safe.

I sure know that feeling. Except that's not what I'm doing any more, is it? Every single day I am logging into this blog and yelling out that I am here, that this is me, that I exist. And I am inviting everyone on Facebook to come along and watch me do it.

And Christ is that scary? But it's also, to borrow from Bukowski, the only good fight there is.

We all have the right to be ourselves, to be fully ourselves, and to feel like that is enough. Feck it, eh? A party where people are gonna shriek at you is a lame-ass party. Go out and create your own. Invite the lovely ones. Provide party rings. Boogie into the moonlight. And whatever anyone thinks, you'll know it was your party. You were here. You existed.

So, in summary, I changed some fonts on my blog and made a big deal of it.

Whatever. Have a nice Friday everyone :)

1 comment:

  1. This is the next best thing to an invitation to your party 😄

    ReplyDelete