On Social Media and Writing
When I was younger and going through the awful years of being a preteen, I got teased for not having a MySpace page. I wasn’t in anyone’s top 10, didn’t lie about my yearly income, and couldn’t cyber stalk my crushes until high school. On one hand it bothered my pubescent mind that my mother was so invested in leaving no traces of her only girl online. On the other hand it soothed my reserved comfort zone. I didn’t have to take the time to present myself on another platform that would leave me open to scrutiny. When you’re at that age, everything is catastrophic. Now that I’m in my 20s’, I get to control what the Internet gets to see from my life. I didn’t exactly dive head first into social media because I enjoy my privacy. I saw the effect social media had and still have on my classmates. Intimate details of people’s lives were displayed for anyone with a computer to see and judge. I wasn’t mentally prepared to deal with that yet. Meanwhile I didn’t even know what to say when I started getting into social media. I didn’t identify myself as a writer or as a poet until I left for college. I would write things in school and I had a back-of-my-mind kind of dream of publishing a book of some kind. Honestly, I really believed my poetry sucked. Something was always off about my wording and poetic structure. The few people I would let read the notes or short stories I wrote always gave me great reviews. But I never really took it seriously. I thought it would pass just like my childhood dream of being a singer.
I think somewhere in between bombing my freshman year of college and taking a creative writing class when I made my way back in helped me become comfortable with letting people in. Even though I can’t see these people who may read my words, there’s still a connection. As I begin to grow into the woman I want to be, I realize that writing is an integral part of who I am. What better way to display my ramblings and grow as a woman than through a blog? A quote I found on Tumblr inspired me to think about how I’m viewing the things I’m currently doing. Here’s the quote:
A Quest is a trip to accomplish a task.
An Adventure is a trip without a destination.
A Journey is when the trip is more important than the destination.
I’m in the transitional stages of seeing my life and my actions as a journey instead of a quest. I say all of this to say that I will be writing more frequently. There will be different kinds of posts here and some of them will be assignments for my course(s). The topics will vary but this does not mean my poetry on this blog will disappear. Hopefully it will only improve.
