Noisy About the Things That Matter
I’ve often told the story that part of the reason I didn’t push myself harder into doing web design was because I was too sensitive about the critiques I’d get for my work. And it’s true, I did not have the emotional self-esteem back then to handle someone saying my work was bad. As the saying goes, I was an artist and I’m sensitive about my shit.
But, there was another side to this. I was bored. One of the websites I did work on was for a local business selling flowers. The website was very barebones. It had no real graphical presence, just a bad color scheme (that the owner seemed to like) and a few images and text. There was nothing exciting about this website at all. And then, it was about flowers, something I couldn’t say I was interested in at the time.
None of the early projects I had allowed me to flex the talent I felt I had. On top of this, they all covered topics or missions I could care less about. I was doing these things for the experience and frankly, I was too impatient for the payoff. I wonder if I were to do a project for a musician or sports team, would I have been more engaged?
While I was in college, I took three different composition writing courses. For the most part, I struggled in these classes. Again, I was asked to write about topics I didn’t really care for. It’s not that any of them were bad, I just didn’t know how to engage with these subjects. But, ask me to do some research about music and I could give you 1,500 words in a day or so. One project I remember was an essay about the emerging Afrobeats scene in Lagos. I wrote that paper in 2012 and it’s still one that comes to mind for me often.
This comes with a bit of a realization for me. I wrote over 1,000 words yesterday about the Atlanta Braves being on television. I made a connection between the person I am now and the person I was growing up. I spoke about something that brings joy to my life and invokes all kinds of other emotions and memories. The Atlanta Braves, the Seattle Mariners, and baseball in general are things I can talk someone’s ear off for hours.
I’m not as blessed as I was when I was younger to know a lot of people who geek out about the same things I do. I am a believer: if you care about another person, whether they be a friend, romantic interest, or a colleague, you should engage with them a bit about what they care about. It’s noticeable when it’s a one-way street, trust me. But, I also understand not everyone is going to engage with me the way I always hope for. I feel those kinds of deeper-level conversations are actually quite rare, but yet they’re so required for us to have.
That’s where this site comes in for me. It’s my outlet. This is where I can open myself up and talk about whatever is on my mind as passionately as I want to. I have no clue who my audience is or if I even have one. Occasionally, I’ll get a comment from one of my posts on Mastodon and even more rarely off Facebook. Even more rare are the emails, but those are probably the best ones as it becomes a one-on-one conversation with someone who you’ve struck a chord with. They’re often thousands of miles away, never met them in person, but a connection was made, if even for a few brief moments of give and take.
The bottom line here is I write because I do care about these things and I need to be able to talk about them somewhere. Sometimes I’m processing, other times I’m just really happy to talk about something. But, I need to have this dialog, even if it never gains an audience. And I find with that passion, I can actually write a lot more freely than I ever did in college.
I think a lot of people get intimidated by having a blog because they don’t think they know what to write. I think the minute you let go of that pressure, the floodgates will then open up. And it doesn’t have to be words. It can be your photos, your paintings, the videos you make, music you’ve created, the flowers you’re growing, whatever it is you want to create that you get excited for. I think it is natural for us to want to share these things because we are social beings. We’re better off for giving in to that instinct.
This is where I don’t feel algorithmic social media is the answer, because that algorithm will most likely suppress your voice if it’s not something that sparks a heated emotion in someone else. When it comes to the things you care about most, having a place where you can own your voice, a personal website, is the best option. It’s an intimate setting for you to be as noisy as you want to be about the things that matter to you.
I’ve stated a few times I long for my personal friends to have personal websites. I’ll gladly follow all of them and engage when my trigger is tripped. That said, I already follow dozens of personal websites and each of them brings their own instinctive rhythm into my feed. It shows me that while we’re all very different in many ways, we all have things that we’re passionate about, and in that we’re the same. If you have a site you’d like to share, send it my way.
I wrote more about getting a personal website some time back. That link is below:
