Feed9/7/26 - What is this feed all about?For starters, I sort of find the word 'feed' a bit icky. It evokes consumers gobbling up slop like pigs at a trough, and really plays into the dystopian hellscape that so much of the internet has become. But in the moment I couldn't think of anything that fitted this rolling post thingy I wanted to do any better. I may still change it if I think of something better before (if) anybody actually starts reading it. Currently I seem to be the only person on the planet that knows my website exists.The fact that I just slapped the first word onto this section of the site that I could think of is sort of the point. Amongst other things, I'm hoping that getting my thoughts out in this format will be a kind of therapy for me. I'm hopeless at getting creative things done - I have no end of ideas, but I get crippled at the 'putting things down' stage. In part it's a kind of perfectionism, but maybe not in the typical sense. I actually like things that are raw and imperfect and rough around the edges. My problem is I can't stop thinking. I literally have a running narrative almost every moment of every day. If there's a project or something in my head, I'm incessently turning it over in my mind, getting dissatisfied with what I have planned for it, finding ways it could be better or better reflect my original vision, to the point where I never stop thinking and actually get to making it. The frustrating thing is I seem to get too much dopamine from just the idea of a cool project. It's kind of nice that I can get enjoyment out of just scribbling down a few dot points into a text file about the awesome all-in-one retro style keyboard/computer I want to design. But somewhere deeper there's a dissatisfaction or emptiness about the fact that it's never getting past that stage and nobody will ever see it, apart from my mind's eye. Because the other reason for this feed is I have a pathological fear of parts of my life passing by and vanishing, unrecorded and unwitnessed. As a chronic procrastinator, this fear hasn't, until now, actually resulted in my doing much to address it. But it still makes me uncomfortable and sad that I'm the only one that knows much about my cool retro computers, or what I did on this or that holiday, or some rare insight I feel I've had on this or that issue. I kind of want those parts of my life (definitely not all of it mind you) to be shared, published, circulated and witnessed by more people. And it's not just my lack of proaction or my perfectionism that has stopped me until now - it's also a weird social anxiety I have. Don't look for me on any social media - you won't find me. At least for now. In a lot of ways I like the way my ADHD brain works, but the RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) is the most crippling and detested aspect of it. Undiagnosed and unaddressed for most of my life, this little sore has festered and created a splotchy patchwork of fears in me related to how I relate to others. One of these, which honestly is a blessing in disguise, is a hatred for social media. I've tried facebook, bluesky and mastodon, but they just don't appeal to me. But as the primary way in which people share their lives and their thoughts these days, it's meant closing my life off to most people. Strangely, posting in a feed I maintain on a website I control doesn't seem to give me the same anxiety posting to facebook does. |