it's a double edged sword...

Recently I was rereading blog posts and I was struck again by how terrible they are ?? I swear, sometimes I can be a good writer and this just isn't showcasing my best stuff. The ideas are jumbled and unclear, different posts contradict each other, and I repeat phrases and sentiments SO OFTEN. Apparently, I have a particular fondness for the phrase "it's a double-edged sword."

But I use this blog as a diary and as a writing exercise now, not a portfolio. And everyone knows diary entries are messy and hypocritical, because you feel different ways at different points in your life, even if that's just day to day. I don't edit anything on this blog once I post it. I feel that it's important to me to have a space that's purely stream-of-consciousness and spontaneous, so I'm trying not to be too hard on myself. The plan was to never even look at the posts again after I publish them, but what can I say? End-of-the-year reflection got the better of me, I guess.

The original title of this post was going to be something about sirens, and I was going to talk about Margaret Atwood's poem Siren Song-- but I realized that I'd already talked about my experiences as a muse, and the isolation I felt because I thought I had to be "not like other girls" blah blah blah which is what I would have said in my analysis of the poem anyway. Self-awareness and self-reflection are important, and I think this post will be more interesting anyway. At the very least, it's something I don't think I've discussed on here yet...?

Even though I know this blog is essentially a collection of my worst writing, I still expected more from my past posts. I was expecting the worst, and I was still disappointed that I wasn't always well-spoken, graceful, or you know, clear. And I realized I also had really unrealistic expectations for myself, surprise surprise! I want to be prolific and knock it out of the park anytime I sit down to write. You can't have both. I choose to make my cringe-y writing public, because I don't want to hide my creative trajectory. I'm a firm believer in the importance of creating prolifically and publicly early on in your career, because a) how can you get better id you don't practice? and b) you can always look back to see how you've grown, and if someone admires your work later on, they can also look at your early stuff, and feel less bad about being an amateur.

Sure, there are people that might make fun of your bad art, but people with attitudes like that will never create anything meaningful, because they're so blinded by superiority to understand the strange beauty that comes from creating anything at all, and who wants them around anyway? I tell my friends this all the time when they're debating whether or not to share something they've made with the world, but I need to start telling it to myself too. I find myself thinking, there's so many people more talented than me who aren't sharing their work with the world, so where do I get off? I don't know, but here I am, posting poorly photoshopped portraits and loving it. To save this post from being too *~inspirational~* I want to close by saying that lately I've been really sick of my writing, the things I say, the same thoughts I have. When I looked back at the posts I made in 2019, despite everything I've said here, I didn't feel like I'd grown at all as a writer or person. And that's not a double edged sword. That feeling just sucks. And that's okay. Because I know someday-- maybe not next year, or the year after that, but someday-- I will look at these posts and see the seeds of something great.