Hello. Welcome to whatever this slop is.

• It's 10:04PM on a Tuesday, and I want to have a website.
• I don't have any plans. I just know that I need to make this website.
• I don't really want to make it. At work, I sometimes have to manage the website for my company. I can do this sort of thing, but when I get home I don't want anything to do with work. I want complete separation from that world.
• But I've realized that I think I have to make a website. Just whatever comes up, put it there. I don't need high effort for something that is just a weird public facing personal project.
• And it's that phrase, "public facing", that's making me anxious. And when I get anxious, I start making up excuses for how to avoid doing the thing. What I need to do is confront that anxiety, attack it. So what is it about "public facing" that makes me anxious?
• I grew up in a sort of suburban bubble with myths about "men in white vans" and all that shit. Yet one thing that really stuck with me that I can't shake is this old 2000s-ism about all the spooky people you might find on the internet. I've been here long enough to have seen good people and bad people come and go, to know that this "spooky people" thing was fear-mongering. Sort of like the myth of watching too much TV will rot you from the inside out, and now we spend every waking moment glued to a smartphone. something something media diets. I don't care and I'm not going to judge anyone for their screentime or whatever.
• I don't know how much examination of myself I really need to do. If there's really a bottom to the pit, or if I can really gain anything from going all the way down there. I think I know intuitively that I get in my own way all the time, and what I need is to reassure my brain that I can do things and I won't fly into panic or lose control.
• I sometimes feel deathly afraid of sharing myself with the world. I just don't want to speak. I don't want to be percieved. I don't feel it as strong as I used to, which is probably a combination of meds and therapy, but it still comes up from time to time. Mostly when I'm doing things that feel like a huge waste of time and energy, suddenly my mind turns inward and feels the need to attack itself for fun I guess. But sometimes there's a flash of it when I get an almost 3rd person glimpse of what I must look like right now, doing whatever thing I'm doing. A spotlight turns on behind me to show me off in all my glory, doing whatever. This is usually a moment of feeling very self-concious.
• It's not as bad as I make it sound. At least not anymore. Maybe I developed a detached attitude towards things and, for better or worse, I can get through the day without wanting to scream or throw up.
• Again, not as bad as it sounds. I've never thrown up because of anxiety. Just dry heaved. And felt like I was weightless.
• I think what I want to do, as gross as it feels, is just to write my thoughts down somewhere public. I would normally feel mortified at the ieda of someone finding something of mine that's personal, that shares my feelings on anything. That's not the way I want to be.
• At least here, on a website, I feel some semblance of control over how things get shared. It's predictable. It doesn't have any sort of marketing theory behind it for engagement or whatever. It is straight up designed for me to get uncomfortable "oversharing" (whatever my head considers oversharing) so that I can recognize that it's not that big a deal and get over it.
• I don't think this will work because the anxiety doesn't come from having thoughts I want to share. It comes from others seeing those thoughts and me being judged on them. To have these thoughts floating in the void of cyberspace with no idea if anyone will read them fills me with a kind of paranoia that somehow someone is always watching.
• And this is what I want to confront. This feeling. Just sit with it.
  • "Indecent exposure."
  • "Shame."
  • "Disgust."
  • "Vanity."
  • "Imposter/poser."
• I think I would just die if someone knew who the person writing this was. And I'm afraid that in writing that, someone will take that as a challenge. "DO NOT BE VULNERABLE ON THE INTERNET! NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT!" I hear myself screaming from inside. Maybe. Is it cringe? Probably. Do I care? Yeah, a bit too much. I don't want to care, but I do. And then I make things that are impersonal and I feel bad when it's all soulless. God forbid a piece of myself is in it. How unsanitized.
• I'm not afraid of knowing myself, but I am afraid of someone else knowing me. Not in like this dark, edgy way like how the words kind of look when I read it back, but in a way that induces anxiety at the thought of someone else thinking about me and considering me a part of their life. "Please don't do that. Pretend I don't exist." I don't want thoughts like that anymore. I want to be able to not think about this shit anymore.
• I wanna be a freak! I don't wanna be a freak! Ahh get a fucking hobby!
• I feel there are a lot of things inside me that have been left unchallenged. Or, there was a time when I was tackling those things and then I stalled out.
• Proof-reading stream of conscious writing is rough. How do you not take psychic damage from that? Like it's out of my head and it's in front of me now and it's gross.
• How do I develop my writing voice so that it doesn't sound like it was written by an insecure teenager?
• Maybe it's not the writing, but the writer... doing the writing? Words are hard.
• Am I really going to try to proofread all of this? What am I, a professional diary writer? Who cares? This isn't made to make sense.
• Maybe I need to learn to love being embarrassed. Nah, that sounds weird when I write it out.
• I've been writing a lot with LogSeq and I like the default journaling style it comes with. I'm not really using it for linking things, just as a canvas to write stuff down, collected in chronological order.
• I should build up a collection of things I actually like and think are cool and want other people to see. And then I should put it here. Wouldn't that be neat? Why haven't I done this already?
• This is kind of an extension of that. Just writing all over the place, stream of conscious and non-linear. Jumping around to whatever bulletpoints and continuing the thought where I left off. I don't even think it's theraputic or mindful or whatever. It's just word vomit.

If you read any of this, I appriciate you, and you didn't see shit.

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