what i seem to me
I was recently trolled by the infamous Unfollow Friday. Strangely enough, this has increased my readership. To be honest I don’t really care about being flamed or the increase in readership, but this incident has gotten me thinking about the creation of my image.
I started this blog as part of a New Year’s resolution to write more for myself. I never wanted to turn it into anything huge because I wanted to push original content, mostly reflections about my life. And while I never went through an era of crippling low self-esteem, I have also never pictured myself as the most interesting or special person in the world. Thus, forcing myself to write daily was somewhat of a challenge.
In some ways this blog has become one of the most honest things I’ve ever done. Because I initially kept it private from all of my friends, I found I could write about everything I was going through with little censorship. However, I did restrict myself in certain aspects in an unconscious attempt to create an image of someone likable. I didn’t censor myself, per se, but I refrained from giving in to every urge to post something stupid every other second and from exposing the most private details of my life. Somehow I figured this would cheapen the rest of my other posts, the ones that I spent time on and actually tried to make worth reading.
I’m not sure why I cared so much about this, or at all. I never wrote to an audience, so I could have been as obnoxious and spur-of-the-moment as I’d wanted. Still, it came to me after contemplation that I cared not because I wanted other people to like me, but that I wanted me to like me, years from now, when I look back in retrospect at my 18 year old self. I want to look back and see how I’ve matured into an adult, not how I’ve transformed from idiot to less-idiotic.
In any case, what I seem to be is just an image that I’m projecting from myself, to myself. I don’t care about readership, or about what others really think. Narcissistic as it seems, as long as I like me, it’s all good.
i’m one of the people who added her after seeing her on unfollowfriday. i decided to start following her because she seems genuinely sweet, and though i only read a small sampling of what she’s written, i feel like our college experiences were sort of similar. also, she goes to UCSD and i moved to del mar, north county san diego about a year ago, and its always fun to read blogs of people who live around the same area you do :)
