The Decade in Review
Jan. 1st, 2020 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorLooking back on the last decade, I can say I'm in a very different place in my life now than I was 10 years ago. For one thing, I had no real social media presence, and had never put any of my fanfiction online at that point. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I had never done those two things. While I've always grappled with questions of ethics, being exposed to so many people talking about their personal lives and political thinking gave me a very different perspective on many of those questions than I'd previously had.
For the first time, I was seeing a window into other people's lives and thinking that I'd long been cut off from due to my considerable isolation. And not only that, but I was seeing that window for so many different people, including people I would likely never hear talking about such things offline. In fact, for a while it was overwhelming, because my approach had been to mostly listen to what people say, including to each other, rather than participate fully in conversation myself. This was because I was always trying to learn more how to talk to people and that was the least stressful way to learn. But that is considerably less overwhelming offline where there aren't millions of different you could potentially be listening to. Of course, people often behave very differently offline than online, but both contexts show aspects of how people are thinking. I started to try to actually socialize on social media. And after a while, I learned the importance of blocking people on social media.
Joining social media was also something that I only ended up doing because earlier, I had posted my fanfic online for the first time ever. In a few days, Ascent will have been online for close to eight years now. It's a story I'm still working on today. It was far from the only fanfic I'd ever written at the time. I'd been aware of fanfic for a long time and had written a number of works for myself, but had never posted them online. For a number of reasons, the thought of doing so had intimidated me, and so I kept my writing to myself. I'd never had that kind of casual feedback on my writing, and it was a very new experience. Most feedback I'd gotten previously was from a very small number of people, mostly teachers or professors grading my work in an academic setting or from the very small number of people I showed my writing to. This was very different. Story-writing, which had long served as a mostly private personal outlet for me, began to take on an expanded significance in my life.
Anyway, there's a lot more that went on than that, but I think that's what I feel most comfortable talking about publicly. I do still greatly value my privacy, after all.
For the first time, I was seeing a window into other people's lives and thinking that I'd long been cut off from due to my considerable isolation. And not only that, but I was seeing that window for so many different people, including people I would likely never hear talking about such things offline. In fact, for a while it was overwhelming, because my approach had been to mostly listen to what people say, including to each other, rather than participate fully in conversation myself. This was because I was always trying to learn more how to talk to people and that was the least stressful way to learn. But that is considerably less overwhelming offline where there aren't millions of different you could potentially be listening to. Of course, people often behave very differently offline than online, but both contexts show aspects of how people are thinking. I started to try to actually socialize on social media. And after a while, I learned the importance of blocking people on social media.
Joining social media was also something that I only ended up doing because earlier, I had posted my fanfic online for the first time ever. In a few days, Ascent will have been online for close to eight years now. It's a story I'm still working on today. It was far from the only fanfic I'd ever written at the time. I'd been aware of fanfic for a long time and had written a number of works for myself, but had never posted them online. For a number of reasons, the thought of doing so had intimidated me, and so I kept my writing to myself. I'd never had that kind of casual feedback on my writing, and it was a very new experience. Most feedback I'd gotten previously was from a very small number of people, mostly teachers or professors grading my work in an academic setting or from the very small number of people I showed my writing to. This was very different. Story-writing, which had long served as a mostly private personal outlet for me, began to take on an expanded significance in my life.
Anyway, there's a lot more that went on than that, but I think that's what I feel most comfortable talking about publicly. I do still greatly value my privacy, after all.