(With gratitude to dear Sebrina for reminding me that oh yes! My website exists and is still a thing if I want it to be ♥️ )
So I haven’t posted here in five forevers—not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, and not that I managed to write/post art/promote enough to actually gain a “following” before I made my exit from the smoldering ruins of Twitter—but here I am again, making an earnest attempt to just fucking do something already. So hello, friend. Welcome to my mess. I’ve got gizmos and gadgets aplenty to share with you! By which I mean “some weird drawings” and “kind-of book reviews” and “thoughts about stuff and junk that come to me while I’m floating around an emotional void.”
I’m not a “content creator.” I’m from the Ancient Internet, Pre-Social-Media Age, where “web log” hadn’t yet been shortened to “blog,” and I wrote HTML in Notepad, and had to know how to upload that HTML to an FTP server, and belonged to webrings (groups of folks with websites that were loosely related on a theme, and a set of links on the main homepage could take you forward and back through members’ sites), and it was exciting to have a personalized URL. Then came the convenience of writing on LiveJournal, where I was far too confessional, but I was surrounded by others being far too confessional, and we were doing it longform in a browser window instead of in app-friendly, pithy, bite-sized chunks. I don’t have any affiliate links; I don’t have anything to sell you. To kind of quote The Moldy Peaches, I don’t want more fans; I want more stage. I just want room to do stuff. Put my ideas out there. Show that I exist in some fashion. And rather than “fans,” I want community. I want pals/chums/likeminded nerds with whom to share vents and delights alike.
Quite frankly, I cringe at the word “content,” especially coming from the mouths of people who are writing essays or producing videos that actually say things. It’s used as a catch-all for anything an individual can consume, even spreading over to the realm of TV, films, video games, books for fuck’s sake. Yet we haven’t come up with a term to defy this conglomeration and seem, en masse, to loathe differentiating between types of creation—as though it’s “too extra” to be specific. Don’t get me started on { I N F L U E N C E R S } and the TikTokification of everything, where one person creates something relatable and 60,000 people put out their own, virtually identical version.
Anyway.
I think my issue in sharing any of my thought-matter is that I don’t have a set topic of interest for this effort. I dibble. I dabble. I tried to make it a book blog sort of affair, or at least was chronicling my venture back into the world of reading, but I made the mistake of trying to create a structure and schedule. This might work for most people, but as much as I need scaffolding to keep my life in order, imposing any kind of framework on what I want to do provokes an irresistible urge of low-key refusal. This is slightly different than the difficulties I encounter creating structure around things I need to do, like maintaining a household and personal upkeep—I’ve found in the last few years that I can build habits for things I need to do, though sometimes it takes a near-Herculean effort and absolute commitment to the bit. For example, as a person with ADHD (and some issues relating to basically being my parents’ little butler growing up—a common joke about our lack of modern home appliances was “who needs a dishwasher? We have Cosmic!”) it has been really hard as an adult to stick to things like cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, etc., etc. Vacuuming is actually its own sensory issue; even with noise-canceling headphones I have an entire-body NO reaction to the task, but I get around it with a rubber broom and some elbow grease.
This is to say: I can wash my dishes every night and leave my kitchen in a neat, clean state ready for the next day; I can squeegee the shower and air out the curtain and scrub the toilet; I can input data into a series of spreadsheets daily to track anything from spending to movies watched to books borrowed and read; I can even get my shit together enough to go to the grocery store and know exactly what I want to buy and why with very little diversion from the list I’ve made. But “posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday”? Nope. Can’t do it. Even if there’s nobody reading this it feels like too much pressure—pressure to have something worthwhile to say, pressure to have a complete book review rather than just some barely sketched-out thoughts while I’m in the middle of a book but really need to tell the world about it, pressure for the expression and composition to be just so and worth bothering with; additionally, all the archived posts should also be worth bothering with, making any clunky or clumsy posts from the blog’s inception fodder for deletion lest it induce cringe in a new visitor or myself.
And then the pressure to promote so it will get in front of eyeballs! The accepted “necessity” that anyone sharing things on the internet must have an account on every conceivable social media platform so the folks on Instagram (but not TikTok) will find it and the ones on Facebook (but not Twitter) will be aware, monitoring stats to see if anyone’s clicking through and targeting the ones with the most “engagement.” We exist on an internet ruled by search engine optimization and algorithms, where not posting enough or posting the wrong things can dim the spotlight and muffle voices, where “don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe!” is just a series of sounds that have ceased to mean anything. I’m subscribed to so many YouTube channels that sometimes I forget what specific creators call themselves and can’t remember how to find them in the list (fuck me twice if they change their “branding”), and my playlist of “liked” videos is just random anything and everything instead of things I truly enjoyed, and I comment only rarely because oftentimes what I want to say has already been expressed and my input would just be swallowed like the cry of one seagull in a whole screaming flock clamoring for the only french fry on the beach.
It’s exhausting just being a passive participant in this cycle, let alone making any kind of contribution to it.
I’m old. I’m tired. I’m not particularly special. I’m just some 43-year-old, soon to be 44, who likes to write down her thoughts, and read books, and watch movies, and listen to funny podcasts about movies. I am low-key disgusted by social media and an unreliable participant in social groups and friendships due to inattentive ADHD (well, I prefer its much nicer nomenclature, “dreamy type,” but let’s be real about my tendency to stare into space and lose hours to nothing). But I still want a place to say hello/scream into the ether/share some art/recommend a book/whatever without feeling like everything must be the perfect length (either padding the word count or cutting it way back), or feeling compelled to explain myself in great depth even if I don’t feel like it. I mean, I generally don’t care about being “perfect”—the older I get, the less fucks I have to give, and I must conserve them wisely—but as the saying goes, “we live in a society.” I’m still influenced by the status quo, even if I don’t want to admit it. I still have moments where my self-esteem wavers and I don’t have the personal audacity to believe I’m worth expressing myself. I’m even rather aware of how long this piece is, and how little time most people have to spend on a complete stranger shaking her fist at a cloud while she yearns for the internet of old. (You should hear me rant about video essays more than an hour long. Who has that kind of time? What makes this guy’s opinion so compelling? The brass balls on ‘em to think a busy person will spare the three and a half hours! Etc., etc. Yet I’ll listen to a 15 hour audiobook or a 2 hour podcast. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, OKAY?)
If there was a point in all of that, it’s that we’re all dancing around this spinning blue ball of dirt for whatever time we’re given. That time is not guaranteed, and there’s a lot of us. And we’re not all going to have the ambition, reach, or platform to express ourselves in an expertly crafted, polished, generally four-star-rated must-see/read kind of way. But we all have thoughts, we all have perspectives, and even the most hermit-like among us will sometimes want to reach out and share it. So if you’ve somehow made it here to cosmichyatt dot com, home of the slogan “proudly 100% AI-free!” and fierce defense of all things human and fragile and imperfect, AND you made it to the conclusion of this half-arse essay about creation and connection: then I have reached out and shared that perspective at least once this year, and I’m satisfied to have done it. I don’t want to promise I’ll be back next Friday with another half-arse essay or a book review or have certain days for certain kinds of { C O N T E N T } so a returning visitor will know what to expect. I might be back Monday with a drawing of a potato smoking a cigarette. I might be back Tuesday with a haiku or Wednesday with a tarot card pull. Who knows? This is a game of lucky dip, where you show up and sometimes there’s something and sometimes there isn’t, and you don’t know what little prize will be concealed within.
But isn’t that it’s own kind of joy? Being surprised? Maybe even being disappointed?
’Til next time, chum. Whenever that is. ♥️
P.S.: if you saw that the post prior to this one was back in October and it encompassed a tarot art challenge, let me tell you: I only got four or five days into my own challenge before I abandoned it. And that’s perfectly fine!
Cosmic’s Read-o-Rama 