Wednesday 28 September 2016

On this blog

I don't like my blog name.  I haven't liked it since the day I turned a year older than I was when I concocted it up at the awkward, clueless age of 14.  I remember lying in bed the night before I decided to create this blog, deciding on all the details of my first post and the logistics of the design.  For some reason the name was already decided at this point.  I must've spent a solid 5 minutes on it.  At the time, I guess, The Life of Little Me had a nice little ring to it.

Now it just sounds childish and unprofessional.  It sounds like the kind of blog a 14 year old girl would make to tell you all about her latest read of 'The Fault in Our Stars'.  It sounds like the kind of name that belongs to that tacky looking blue blogger design this blog first had.  I don't like being 'little me' because little seems so demeaning.  I don't like this being 'the life of' because it can only be a fragment of what I do and am.  I certainly do not like the link 'thelyfof...'.  It sounds like a 14 year old trying to be cool.

But at the same time, I don't know if I want to change it.  The Life of Little Me is a name that has been here from the beginning.  I wouldn't be able to associate this space with anything else.  I wouldn't know what else to call it either.  In some ways, while the name may seem immature, I think it's managed to grow with me.  I can look at it now and see this blog as it is, the things I share as they are.  The Life of Little Me isn't so much five different words strung together to form a cute little informative title.  Instead it's this one word, one string of letters, and it's my blog.

And yes, my URL is absolutely atrocious, but hey, what can you do.  Trying to change it would be too much hassle.  Here's hoping nobody notices.

...........

This blog has been through two designs.  The first was very very blue.  It could be compared to the 2006 version of Microsoft Office in my opinion.  It was clunky and clashy and awkward.

On my blog's one year anniversary I decided to become inspired again (but evidently, not inspired enough to learn how to code).  I googled the first remotely attractive free minimalist blog design and copied and pasted the html code - it was an incredibly smooth transition that took no thought whatsoever.  This blog design could be more comparable to the 2013 version of Microsoft Office, which is a big step up from 2006.

But now here I am deliberating whether to change it up again.  I've been loving the blogs with huge images which make their minimalist designs look less monotone.  I've been loving the blogs with only fragments of their posts on their home page, asking you to click to read more.  I've been loving the blogs without sidebars, leaving a wider screen available to showcase their actual content.  The problem here is that I don't have enough images, or the skills to actually code such a design.

This blog is also more writing based than image based, and frankly, I don't have the time or the interest to take beautiful photos for every post.  I would like the flexibility to position such photos where ever I would want in whatever size I would want though, but these are the limits of not being a tech-savvy blogger who would never pay for her own domain.

...........

Over the two years I've been here my content has never changed.  I may post less often and about different things, but effectively it's all still me sharing stuff I care about with you.

This blog has always been flexible.  There are no labels here.  There's no purpose.  There's no editing or drafting or planning.  I've always been able to post what I want when I spontaneously want to.

I read so many posts about bloggers who are concerned about their followers and making their lives look perfect.  I hear so many people come here with the intent of becoming famous somehow, without actually knowing what their blog is for or what they're here to write about.  But who am I to judge?  We all blog for different reasons, and I'm just thankful that while my 14 year old self didn't have the best judgement with names or designs, she did have the idea to start this blog.

I'm thankful that this blog is still here as my little me project, and probably always will be.

Love,
M

Wednesday 14 September 2016

Limitation.

I reached the last page of my diary today.  The pretty brown and gold notebook is now completely filled with my continuous stream of thoughts since last November.  It's like the end of an era; I've hit the last page, I've hit a brick wall.  I've documented and documented and large fragments of my identity are scattered in this one book of lined pages.  I say fragments because there is no way the essence of my thoughts could be perfectly articulated into words.  No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I wish to be able to understand myself - it feels impossible.

I was reading through my diary and a common self-talk conversation came up intermittently, especially at the beginning of this year.  Don't succumb to influence, I told myself again and again.  You don't need to be validated by other people.  Be carefree.  You're better than that.  These thoughts, this mantra of sorts, has been being inwardly repeated for months and months, and it is now September.  My diary is proof of this.

As a result, over 2016, I've become less accepting of others and more judgemental.  I don't want to "succumb to influence" so I won't try this new thing, I won't embrace this or that.  I am my own person so there is no need to follow any form of trend, to follow anyone else's idea but my own, right?  Instead I'll judge others who do.  I'll think I'm too good for them.  I'll think I'm too good for everyone who hadn't made it onto my sacred list of friends before this cut off date, where I decided that self-actualisation came in the form of closing myself off to anything new, because if I'm truly being me then I shouldn't pay attention to anything else, right?

By recording everything, by writing this blog, in a way I'm defining myself without really understanding who I am - and that's dangerous.  I'll think I'm making sense of everything, I'll think I'm discovering myself by reading my thoughts on a page - but these words aren't accurate depictions of my thoughts.  I'm writing down what I already know, and I'm limiting myself to just that by thinking these words are who I am, and that's all there is to me.

It's like once the words are written on a page, they're definite.  I no longer have the flexibility to change that thought or opinion, to redefine myself in that sense.  I'm stuck and I'm limited.  That's the danger of curating your own personal brand.  If you've already defined yourself, how do you change that definition?  How do you expand to possibly discover and become something new if you've already decided what you are, and you've posted and posted fragments of this identity you've created for yourself for everyone to see.  There's no going back now.  There's no room to change.

It's a trap.  It ruins the fluidity of a being.  We've been moulded and shaped by our own selves through our words and our photos, and that has then seeped into our personalities and our interests, and now we've created identities that we don't want to stray from, because it just seems unthinkable.  We already know who we are, so what's the point, right?

On Sunday I realised that something that had been taking up a lot of my mind-space actually didn't matter too much to me after all, and so the cogs in my brain started working again, and I thought that as of Monday I should join in more.  I would be more accepting, I would be more pleasant, I would embrace ideas and conversations I would have inwardly rolled my eyes at and been condescending about only a week before.  I defied this self-proclaimed society-view I had written down and made definite, and it felt good.  

I had taken the self-defense mechanism of believing other people didn't matter, that embracing new things didn't matter, out of fear of rejection.  I had taken this and convinced myself it was self-actualisation.  I had made this view a part of my identity and it limited me from living properly.

It seems as if we all only want to know what we want to know about ourselves, when it isn't so much about knowing rather than creating.  Some people want to be super political, they want to seem bigger than themselves and their little bubble.  Some want to be super artistic, going through the most extreme efforts to do something unique (yet I find that most of this 'artistic' stuff has the same vibe as all the others, so most of it really isn't that unique at all).  They all want to discover that they are political or artistic or whatever they wish to be, and day by day they make themselves more so, because they are creating themselves this way, not discovering something that was already there.  But now they are trapped.  They have limited themselves to this 'political' or 'artistic' personal brand they have been nursing into existence.

And I think we should just be aware of these limitations we are inflicting upon ourselves.  We should be aware that our identities are fluid, not fixed, forever changing if we let it do so.

Love,
M

Saturday 3 September 2016

Week 7

Monday to Friday and it's the weekend and then it's Monday again.  I've been through this seven times over in a row.  Sometimes there's assessment, sometimes there's not.  Sometimes I do something Friday night, sometimes I don't.  I've been through short-lived phases of boys, makeup, classical books, braiding, postcards... Here's week 7:


MONDAY

There's a massive 3000 word physics research report due on Thursday and I'm only 2000 words in.  Yet, instead of writing those final paragraphs, I decide that obsessively finishing my maths homework is the priority.  I work all through my free period, trying to concentrate and listen to music in vain while people are talking and laughing all over the room.  I work all through recess.  I skip PE and work through all of that too.  There's another girl in the room who disturbs me every five minutes or so.  She contributes to my study playlist and we name an album after her in my iTunes library.

By the end of Monday I have two more paragraphs to go.




TUESDAY

The brass section of the orchestra are playing this really loud piece to open the school's special concert this year, so in the morning we rehearse on the balcony.

We drive past the parliament house every day on our way home, and today there is a seating.  There are military guns and tanks on display, and various tourists are taking photos.  My mum stops the car, says, "these are the perks of living in the capital,"and I am delayed from getting home against my wishes.  I run up to the majestic looking building in my heavy school uniform in desperate need of the bathroom.  We go inside the parliament house in search of free postcards, but of course there are none.  I am rude to a group of school kids on an excursion in my attempts to get out as quickly as possible.

In the evening I spend a good six minutes walking to the post box to deliver a postcard to the Philippines.  I'm listening to some song from a really nice movie soundtrack.

By the end of Tuesday my report is finished and the majority of it has gone under vigilant editing.




WEDNESDAY

I spend my double free referencing my report.  I then spend all of English referencing my report.  And all of the next period too.

There is a massive argument in my physics class about the unknown requirement of in text referencing, which is only worth half a mark of our report, but which is still a considerable amount.  My teacher doesn't deal with it very well and everyone hates him more than they did before.  The argument went way too far, in my opinion.

My driving instructor picks me up from school and I learn how to park and give way, but my concentration just isn't there.  He ticks off zero competencies.  Hopefully next week will be better.

I have my first shift at work in over a week and it's nice.  I teach a girl with a Malaysian boyfriend a little bit of Malay, we discuss the perks of being invited to weddings in the break room, and a lanky guy explains that the reason he now has stubble is because he's growing it out to 'intimidate the opposition' in his grand final game.  He tells me that he reckons at my school I'm a nerd who hangs with the cool kids, whatever that's supposed to mean.




THURSDAY

My physics report is done and gone and I am relieved.  I can now relax.  I watch Gilmore Girls for the first time in days and go for a jog.




FRIDAY

It rains all day and I'm forced to take a fifty minute bus from school to work.  I come to the realisation that some of the people I talk to on snapchat, I really don't talk to in real life, even if they're right over there.  My bag is heavy and awkward and when I get to work I'm practically tumbling up the stairs.  People ask me if I'm okay.  At work a nice girl starts to seem self-obsessed, a guy isn't who I thought he was, I see a friend I haven't seen in ages and I'm wearing matching outfits with this guy in every which way.

After work I find my dad playing basketball in the opposite arcade.  He's somehow managing to get every single shot in with quick one-handed throws.  I have a go and get almost every shot in with two-handed throws.  My mum then has a go and pretty much misses all of it.



....

And I am now spending my weekend studying for Week 8.

Love,
M