A
friend once accused me of “hiding in the blogging equivalent of Afghanistan”.
It really stuck in me; I was prompted to reflect much more deeply about it. (If
you are reading this, you know who you are.) I have had this habit over the
past decade of creating new blogs and locking up old ones every time I enter a
new stage of life – generally when changing schools (P6-Sec1, Sec4-J1…) and I
wonder if it reflects a deeper urge towards not just self-transformation, but
also self-concealment – a deeper discomfort with who I am or was, and a
fundamental worry that my past selves will intrude on my present, stopping me
from who I want to be. This observation is not without some element of insight,
even if it is not entirely true (since often I stop blogging because I lose
steam) but the possible imprecations are partially valid – that I am,
underneath it all, quite missing.
I’ve
also come to acknowledge, if rather slowly, that one cannot shelve away bits of
life just like that, and that my online compartmentalisation is more of a wish
than a reflection of my sense of self in reality. And in this gap year, when I
have no Institutional Culture against which to define myself (the way I have
always done) perhaps then I will be forced to confront this pit, this emptiness
that is both destabilising and terrifying, but also whispers of liberation.
(From what, you say? I don’t know either!)
A
certain senior advises that I create a Bucket List of things I want to do
before university – for which I shall adapt his five aspects to what I think
suit me better. In the next post, I will post a bucket list of physical,
social, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual goals; physical includes travel
and health, social includes family and friendships but also socio-political stuff,
emotional includes literature, musings, and human connections, intellectual
includes studies, existential ranting, socio-political stuff also, and books,
and spiritual includes….spiritual things, I guess.
So
here’s to ambiguity, and above all, the great and overpowering spirit of
self-declaration and total narcissism that so defines the Internet as well as
every person who starts a blog believing vainly that someone out there is
interested in reading it. Now I must do the laundry. Goodbye.
