Why?

Funnily enough, Bacon’s quote popped up today on my Facebook feed as one of those “memories” (or, I suspect, an attempt to bring low-engagement users back into the fold) and I thought it fit well as a sort of epigraph to my personal website. I’m writing these words for posterity, I suppose, but more for myself, or I want to work toward writing them first for myself.

For most of my life I’ve been waiting for someone to notice me: when I was in middle school I remember thinking about someone coming up to me and offering me fame, money, happiness, because they could tell I had it, whatever it was. The movies that I’m guessing I got this fool notion from never told me what it was, anyway, but the desire for being recognized stuck.

I think, honestly, that it led to some of my problems in pursuing writing really seriously, because I always had this fear or notion that whatever I wrote, even in my most private journals, be published in one of those incredible process-type things, like the big edition of Howl where it has facsimiles of the typewriter pages and Ginsberg’s hand written notes, and that people would be disappointed that I thought all those impolite things about them. So a lot of why I’m writing this has to do with getting over that paranoia and just living my life.

Another reason I’m writing these words is to try and keep myself accountable: I’ve got a daily poetry folder (it’s not quite daily though; I’m still trying), I’m recording recipes, I’m learning the very basics of web development. Plus, I read a lot about identity online and learned about the Indie Web, basically the web of people instead of corporations, and I’m glad I have this site now to be a part of that community.

Also, maybe I am a little vain, maybe I want to dip my toes a little into the self-promotion, develop-my-brand space that we Millenials seem to be so crazy about. So here’s me. Here’s my site, my little slice of Internet pie.