on archives, personas, and dudes being oppressive, as usual

ugly-feelings:

i
i have like 12,927 posts on tumblr and hardly any of them feel relevant to me any more

ii
the other day i went through my blog and deleted posts about k hanna/bikini kill/c love/hole/riot grrrl/”social justice”/other bullshit and a lot of asks because while i love archiving and seeing how i have changed and my interests have changed i want my blog to be a living breathing thing that reflects me and changes with me and that:

1) feels ridiculous because blogs and feelings um
2) is impossible because the internet can, if you let it, put you in a perpetual state of becoming/unbecoming/becoming something that you are/not, being able to take on personae and interests and ways of communicating (chatspeak, punctuation, capitalization, vocabulary/word choice, sentence structure, syntax, “poached” words/blogging circle words/feminist in-circle words. you know what i’m talking about) in very small ways — even within minutes of each other — that change how you are perceived by the reader/viewer/god/whoever, but there always seems to be an audience?

iii
because like sometimes i type like a valley girl 13 year old in an AOL chat room and sometimes i type like a Really Serious Person and sometimes i type like a tumblr girl and sometimes i type like someone else but i don’t know who and maybe you can’t tell but i think you probably can because i notice when other people do it and it’s incredibly interesting

iv
my ex boyfriend used to get on my case about using different tones of voice when i was around different people, especially because i make my voice higher when i’m around authority figures/adults? probably because i am trying to seem less intimidating to them? i also talk a lot like a “teenage girl” in class because i can be pretty fucking articulate on the spot in real life and i know it and i like to fuck with people’s perceptions of intelligence/femininity/teenage girl voices by getting into some serious shit in a squeaky minnie mouse britney spears falsetto like ummmmm totally. i think it’s really funny.

v
but he thought it was fucked up and that i had “multiple personalities” and he’d use that to try to make me act how he wanted me to act because he was an abusive fuckhead and he totally messed with my mental health and my pride in being able to adapt, being able to take on and discard identities when they become useless/boring/Not Fun. like, just because you are base as hell doesn’t mean we all have to be. just because i was a valley girl brat yesterday doesn’t mean i can’t be a serious mean dad today and a gross hippie cat mom tomorrow.

vi
he actually has a tumblr now and all he does is post about star wars and cats and i’m just shaking my head because he is just not the internet. he doesn’t Get the internet the way you probably Get the internet. he needs to stop trying. he needs to get on my level or go the fuck to sleep.

vii
i bet he has like 12 followers lol

all of this is important.

also the “multiple personalities” thing is funny. i took an english class once and was presenting on virginia woolf and how she’s always using different personas and how this makes sense because of course women and other minoritarian subjects always do that because it’s the only way they can say what they want to say—by saying “i didn’t really say it” or “it’s just a persona” or “it’s fiction” or “i was joking” or “that’s just how i talk on the internet” or whatever. the (white, white, white, cis hetero conservative 18th and 19th century-loving) men in the class looked stunned, like they had never thought about this before. 

the other day someone told me that i am nothing like my tumblr. aliza was like “you are exactly like your tumblr.” 

we also talk a lot about “performative posting.” i don’t usually delete or even private things from my archives, but i sometimes post something and then take it back down a few hours later. it’s funny, though. i posted this the other night and then privated it the next morning and spent all day thinking about why. when i saw aliza that night i immediately knew that i was going to unprivate it. it wasn’t even because we discussed it. literally i just was in her presence and was like “why would i keep that private?” feminist permission slip by osmosis just knowing her art.