A year of blog
Today marks exactly one year since the death of cohost, the social media website on which I was before I was here, and more or less one year since I started this blog.
Technically speaking, the latter's anniversary was in late September (around the time I posted my second post here - I'm pretty sure I retrodated the first one to match its cohost posting date), but... anyway. I haven't been posting for the past three months, so this symbolic date feels as good a pretext as any to provide some life updates and other rambles about my presence on the Internet.
An efficient summary is, uuuh, probably this:
![A comic panel featuring a red-haired anthropomorphic mouse, Autumn Winters, saying the following: "It wasn't a huge thing really, just a little creative exercise... Basically I was [READING YURI] and writing reviews and stuff. It was fun, but, y'know, one day it just sorta, started feeling pointless... That's, kind of a trend with me these days aheheh". The part between square brackets is visibly replacing some original text.](https://i50.servimg.com/u/f50/11/96/52/00/nothin10.jpg)
Now, this exaggerates the situation a little. I am actually writing an absurdly lengthy critique of a favorite yuri of mine that doubles as resources on Palestine that I will hopefully get around to concluding soon. I also have a consequent list of post ideas overall, silly or serious, and some of them may even make it here someday!
The energy is just rather scarce. So I'm resting and staying silent in the meantime.
It's also that-- I don't know. Being on the Internet and interacting and being seen feels scary these days - even in the niche form of a blog, even if being noticed also often feels exciting - for reasons tied to mental health problem flareups and social anxiety. I mentioned this cocktail a bit in a post from early March, and though my state since then has overall improved (turns out I was also undermedicated - being underdosed with HRT is no joke, gosh), I still feel... brittle.
More generally, I think one of the main things I gather about myself from this year post-cohost is my shrunken ability to have Internet conversations.
I could have seen that coming, to be honest: I remember leaving Discord in late 2021 when, combined with a deterioration of my mental health, I just burnt out from online instant messaging. I originally considered coming back to Discord as cohost ended to stay in touch with some of the people I met there, and in retrospect it was probably a tad too optimistic. Even more when we add to the pile keeping up with direct messages and emails too.
Heck, this already happened to me on MSN and Skype before that. There's a pattern to this. It's not necessarily something definitive, but these days it's definitely here again.
(I'm sorry if you're among the people who would've liked to keep in touch. Maybe some day. Maybe not. I'm grateful for all the attempts in any case.)
This whole thing also comes with an increased difficulty in sharing what I like in one-on-one discussions, be they online or IRL. This is woven into a lot of relationship trauma and blurry sense of self: sometimes even engaging in stuff I like without bracing myself for it beforehand sends my brain into a tailspin for reasons difficult to articulate. Some of that reactivated recently; and it's just, phew, complicated to feel stable amidst all this.
So, uh, I've been trying to live with that and to accept it. To just lurk on the Internet, and to touch grass, and to see my close IRL friends more and carve time for myself (I've also been making a surprising amount of AMVs, for some reason). These days, I think I need my own space and time to process most things, and to enjoy them mostly alone, and so I'm trying to do that.
And to be gentler with myself (see, I'm writing it to try and do it more).
That being said, screaming into the void of my blog about things I love feels doable still - a solitary endeavor of just getting things out there, on a medium that is one-way rather than two-way. It is still scary - there is something incredibly personal to the experience of a blog, raw and thought-out at the same time - but it is something I want to keep trying, at least for a while. To build a soft den for myself; to write posts I would be interested in reading.
I'll try doing that at my own pace, and I still hope you'll find things worth reading in there.
I wanted to end my post with that, but I felt like I had more things to say; so here are a few more.
First, this year of blog has obviously not just been burning out from online conversations. Despite the above general sentiment, it's also been some exciting moments of me reaching out to people or the contrary at times. It always means the world to send or receive genuine enthusiasm, even when I'm not always able to respond in kind.
This year has also been discovering that I really like writing long posts - even if the blog format enables this a bit too much at times, and even if I overthink them to absurd extents. On the flip side, posting silly short stuff has become more difficult for me, probably because I feel like each and every post on a blog stands out much more compared to the flow of social media... but I'll be trying that out a bit more in some posts to come, I think.
One of the things I theoretically miss the most from cohost is seeing people around - not interacting directly most of the time but just getting indirect news from their posts and lurking. The key word is theoretically; in practice, RSS feeds have me covered, and have allowed me to tailor both the people I receive news from, and the pace of it. Regularly deciding to not refresh my RSS feed for new updates for some time is a extremely helpful thing that has been tremendously beneficial to my mental health - though having mostly slow blog posters in there has helped too.
With this, I suppose I still miss some kind of general feeling of being within the same website? And, you know, visibly sending support through small actions like liking a post or being around in comment sections. You can always reach out, in this world of blogs and websites; but it often feels more costly, at least to me, though it is more valuable too.
This makes me think that I have a lot of mildly hot takes on comment sections, as something that oddly fits my brain somehow as far as interactions go; but this'll be a post for a later time.
Overall, I just want to conclude that it has been really endearing to see other ex-cohost people around doing their own thing since - building their own place to be vulnerable and raw, and some of them also celebrating one year of posting recently.
We keep moving forward; but I must admit, I found myself this morning reading this insightful cohost retrospective and review written one year ago by Ash, and then I ended up browsing sapphic and furry art on that dead social media website... and I suppose that if anything, it is a fitting tribute to what cohost has been.