jayeless@dreamwidth

Gidget is an indoor-outdoor cat, but we (try to) keep her in between dusk and dawn (which is even the local bylaw, although hardly anyone abides by it haha). Last week she was giving us some problems: where usually she'd been coming in between 6–7pm, she was jumping the fence to a neighbour's and not coming home 'til 11pm, if we didn't find her and carry her in before 6. She also wasn't coming in for snacks over the course of the day like usual, nor spending her time chilling in our little backyard where she usually spends a lot of time. Instead, she'd hide in the front flowerbed, or (as I said) jump the fence to our neighbours' properties.

I think there was an obvious cause: where we hadn't had anyone visit for like six months due to the lockdown and then my mum's health issues, we did have my folks visit on New Year's Eve and then three days later on the Sunday (Sunday being the day we usually catch up each week). ( Read more... )

Originally posted at micro.jayeless.net. At the original source, you will also find a photo of my little treasure of a cat.

Hello Dreamwidth! I know I haven't popped in for a long time now, but this weekend the mood's struck me, so here I am.

The chain of thoughts that brought me here isn't really a happy one so I'd rather not go into it, but basically it struck me how much of my social media use these days is passive – lurking, liking and boosting/RTing – rather than me actively posting anything of my own. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but combined with what's been going on IRL I just started to feel like something was being lost. Like, who am I? What's important to me? What do I find interesting? Maybe it sounds self-indulgent but I miss having a space where I would just post stuff relevant to all my interests, and thus put myself almost on full display, rather than being an enigma. Does that make sense?

I kind of miss the era of personal websites and blogs. You know, when you'd pay for your own web hosting and post entries about whatever you liked and maybe have some static pages depending on your hobbies, and you'd try to make a layout that represented you, and you might even join fanlistings or have some way to proclaim proudly that you're really into whatever you're really into. It just felt more personal than the modern era where you create profiles on half a dozen different social media sites and then don't use most of them, or have each one represent a small, atomised side of yourself – like I use Twitter mostly for politics and politics-adjacent stuff, and I use Instagram mostly for cat photos, and I use Reddit mostly to read stuff on various random hobbies I have, like language-learning and technology and food/nutrition and certain fandoms. My memory of personal blogs is probably heavily coloured by nostalgia, but I just miss the days of posting "opinion posts" on all kinds of stuff and then finding people with similar interests to put on your blogroll so you can have discussions about stuff. These days interaction just seems so much shallower, and of course a lot of modern social media is plagued by hostility, to the point you might not even want to bother with it.

Anyway… I guess what I'm trying to get at with this post is that I feel like I've been losing my identity, and I want to get it back. I'm not saying that the cause is modern social media, even if that's what it might have sounded like here. It's really more relationship issues that have brought this so sharply into focus for me. I don't dare mention most of my interests to my partner, because he's aggressively dismissive of most of them, and beyond that his family spent a couple of months bullying me mercilessly for refusing to accept misogynistic “men drink beers around the barbecue, women stay in the kitchen preparing food and washing dishes”-type attitudes. And it's like, have I really minimised myself so much that these people even dared to imagine I would go along with that bullshit? Apparently the answer is yes… so I feel like I really have to go against this and re-assert myself. And it's not like I expect or want any of his relatives to create a Dreamwidth account and follow me here, but I feel like if I can talk about my interests to more supportive people online then I can work up the nerve to insist on talking about them, and not allowing myself to get bullied into silence, IRL as well.

I don't know if Dreamwidth is the full answer to my concern… but at least it's a site where people do tend to post thoughtful, well-considered entries, and there's no reblogging or upvotes/downvotes or the like to enable you to retreat back and not really say anything. You've got to speak up on here or else you're not really doing anything, and that's basically what I want right now. So, hello again Dreamwidth, and hopefully I stick around a little longer this time!