whygodwhy #19: safe as house, quiet as kept
Pretty mortifying – amid mild feelings of accomplishment after having finally updated my website – to click back and realize I wrote the exact same post 6 months ago. Doing great.
Whatever. Suddenly I’ve been nesting with my websites, rearranging and cozying things up.
I uploaded a bunch of old posts from the early wgw days, going back to the 2000s, that I had grown fearful of over the past decade. Just randomly realized I’m not afraid of them any more, or that I’m not afraid of having some of them online anymore, or that there were a few I actually missed having around.
Weird, as least as far the voice of this website is concerned, to see how little has changed in 20 years. A younger me might be terrified of it; the current version of me is mostly relieved. The fear that I had become disconnected with age from some other, more artistically adventurous version of myself, quickly dispelled by the cold realization that I just am how I am, and likely couldn’t change no matter how desperately I wanted to.
Also changed some stuff on kf.com. Mild WordPress fiddling that is boring to talk about but has afforded me no shortage of pridefulness, from editing a text file and SFTP’ing it to a cloud and refreshing a page and seeing that it just worked. You used to have to understand how the internet works in order to build something on it. Now you just have to know how to back up your files and watch a few youtube videos and cross your fingers. Or maybe it’s just about wanting less.
So yay slightly more organized, in the sense of having moved things around and feeling accomplished about it even though you have the exact amount of shit in the exact number of places as when you started.
How should I feel about this, about anything, about the things I accomplished, the things that pass for accomplishment these days, the things I regret ever posting online, the regret about not posting enough online, the things I wrote and promptly forgot about, the things I wanted to write but didn’t and never stopped thinking about.
I have a lot of stuff on the internet, more than I can keep track of, more than I will ever remember. I keep finding it. I’m looking for something on the internet or on my computer and find a story I wrote 12 years ago for a magazine that died before anyone could remember its name. Someone sends an email saying You had this story about x, where can I find it? And I have zero idea what they’re talking about until 2 days later it hits me and I remember, vaguely. I was reading a book recently and the designer’s name was listed in the credits and it sounded familiar and I searched through emails from over a decade ago and found a piece of art he’d created based on one of my stories, a project organized by some website. I don’t remember the story I wrote and I don’t remember the website. Clearly the designer’s done OK for himself in the interim.
Should I keep better track of things? Does it matter? I find it doesn’t. I don’t feel strongly about being surrounded by things from a long time ago. I carried around my old notebooks from high school for years, they traveled with me through I don’t know how many apartments in how many states, until one day I decided, come on, and threw them all out without even looking inside to remind myself what they contained.
Should I feel bad? Should I regret throwing away or misplacing or willfully neglecting things I’ve done, things that were important to me, at some point?
My therapist would remind me that shoulds are my big cognitive distortion, and pretty much a Top 5 Fucked Up Things in my Brain that I Can’t Seem to Change. There are no universal shoulds. Why insist on believing things needs to be a certain way, if they resist being that way? Should statements lead to constant guilt, constant feelings of failure.
Problem: my entire life is a precariously-balanced Jenga pile of should statements.
Anyways it’s springtime on the internet, and this is a perfect example of the type of post that will get deleted forever, eventually.