Purpose of the personal website
When I was a first year university student I used to have a Tumblr blog dedicated to study motivation and tips, or "studyblr" as they call it. I mostly reposted what resonated with me, and would occasionally write something personal and even shared one short "study with me" video.
It was an open and encouraging community: I received direct messages from strangers who would write how much they liked my blog. I befriended one girl who turned out to be a big studyblr blogger, and she made a shout out post tagging me. Following this I gained 1000+ subscribers very fast, and somehow I lost the passion to post anything and one day impulsively deleted it. I think it stopped feeling small and cozy to me. I slightly regret it, and even tried to find ways to restore it recently, but to no avail. Anyways, it was a fun experience and I have lots of warm memories about it and maybe someday I'll be able to find it in the Internet graveyard.
In April 2024 I deleted my Instagram account. It was my only personal social media account left and subjectively the main way I felt day-to-day connected to my friends, acquaintances and old colleagues in Kazakhstan. But it also made me reachable to billions of strangers all over the world who shared just glimpses of their lives. Content, that made me engaged, made me laugh, gave me a sense of novelty every few minutes, but it also made me drained and frustrated at times. It definitely was a love-hate relationship with Instagram, and I decided to finally break it after regularly deactivating and restoring it as a habit. I promised myself that I would never come back to Instagram or any type of social media that encourages short-form content posting.
But I still wanted to exist online. I needed to find a healthy outlet to express myself and I decided to give it a try and run a personal blog one more time for the following reasons:
- I like writing. Writing is a more natural creativity form for me, it is accessible and gives you freedom to narrate and edit without much tools needed.
- Sharing without succumbing to instant gratification. There won't be any kind of reactions enabled for my posts.
- Being a creator rather than a consumer. Running a social media account takes a lot of creativity, especially as visual as an Instagram or TikTok. If you take it seriously, there is a magic of capturing the moment, choosing what to share, selecting the entourage of a song and a witty caption to follow your post. On the downside, I used to endlessly scroll through other's work rather than make my own. The scales weighing production versus consumption were tilted so much, that it did not give me any tangible value. This time there is only one author and there are no other materials available to repost, so such a constraint encourages me to be more authentic and original.
My intentions for this website are to use it as a controlled space to write and share my thoughts, ideas and experiences; to document my life and to be regular in doing so.
As an experiment, I decided not to share this website with anyone until I write at least 10 articles to instill consistency (except for my husband, because I could not wait and showed him the outline the day I bought a domain name).
If you're reading this, it means I probably reached the mark of 10 articles, so welcome and thank you for being here!