a sort of rebirth
This blog has undergone quite a number of url changes actually, because I keep flip-flopping between spotlighting the beautiful words I like in my native language, and also my fictional husband. It is clear what I decided is my brand, though.
Taking my time off social media (particularly Bluesky) has led me to realise things of my own, one major epiphany being that I spent half of 2022 essentially braindead, but really I was "asleep". I was experiencing creative burnout beginning from 2021 and had not realised, decided to keep going on and I was dealing with a lot of circumstantial career struggles, particularly difficult working environments, and it did not help fuel my burnout. I had also experienced difficulties in interpersonal relationships, it made sense that I unknowingly dissociated for most of that year, focusing on family, health and other matters that were not pertaining me.
I notice how slowly, I began to find my will to live and choose, in the past three years. My journal entries were spotty, if not short. But after spending much of my days in my own head, and untangling the threads of experiences I've lived through my MA (English with Creative Writing), my entries have grown longer with evidently more self-reflecting and richer inner world. I do think I occasionally dissociate, but not as much as I had been absent from my body in the past few years.
My fingers feel mine, and so does my heart, my ribs, my stomach.
My anger is mine, and so does my love, my whimsy, my opinions.
I have also come to a realisation how used I'd gotten to being stalked, and though that should go on another post, I feel like I can also extrapolate on this now that I feel like I am regaining my agency. I had spent majority of my life with absence of privacy, nor respect for my choices. The only time I felt I was free from such surveillance was online, as chou. Tumblr soon humbled me, and so did Twitter when communities would leak your private tweets and messages. Following those events, I have decided that for the most part, anything I say and post should always be public, and have actively made such decisions since for every post I post. However, I also have limited my appearance online, despite being the most online person I know (on most messengers: my last seen and online status are invisible). If I feel too unsafe to post something I considered on posting, I will not. But if I do, it's public, and for everybody's view. That way, there's nothing to "leak" about me.
Being online, turns out, means to live a life under surveillance.
What I tried to escape offline, I encounter online.
To conclude, it isn't that I am against being perceived entirely, there is a reason why I create, be it from drawing, writing, to singing There is a reason why I compartmentalise myself -- Sheol is the singer, and Chou is the writer and artist. Me, however, the writer behind Chou, is also someone who has spent majority of their life putting aside their artistry in pursuit of meeting certain expectations and slowly blurring between the two -- Chou is me, and I am Chou.
We are not just offline vs online selves, we are both our offline and online selves.
And this is me coming to terms with that.