Incognito Mode
As I mentioned in my first-ever post on this blog, I merely stumbled upon Bear Blog from a person I follow on Bluesky. It sent me into a sort-of timey-wimey spiral because everything I saw just took me back to the old blogging days, circa early 2000s, when early adopters like myself created our first web logs and wrote about our personal lives under the guise of anonymity.
There is a certain amount of satisfaction that comes with being able to write your heart out with impunity. There is no fear of your words being misconstrued or people in your real-life circles judging your thoughts and ideas, no matter how twisted or inane they may be.
Social media has necessitated the creation of personas, and everything we do on our Instagram stories or Tiktok videos are in service of preserving the personas we have created for the public, not for ourselves.
And so the decision to go incognito for this blog is a conscious one on my part—and already I am feeling the same kind of exhilaration I felt when I typed the first words on my blogspot, or xanga, or livejournal1, or any other blog or site I created during the early days of the Web.
There are thoughts that are simply too difficult or complicated to say out loud2 to circles I’ve created on social media, and so it’s a different kind of rush to have the ability to scream into the void again, to just let it all out.
if you are unfamiliar with some or all of these platforms, I hate you.↩
of course I acknowledge that the anonymity I bought myself is merely a temporary one, and the irony is that the more I blabber here the more people can easily piece together my identity eventually. But still, I’m happy to have been afforded this opportunity again, no matter how fleeting.↩