Princess Diaries ੈ♡₊˚•.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ ꒰ঌ Currently... ໒꒱ ⊹ ࣪ ˖

Mood: Tense

Weather: Windy

Listening to: Traumatic Livelihood by Jazmin Bean (+ her entire debut album)

Reading: The Premed Playbook Guide to the Medical School Personal Statement: Everything You Need to Successfully Apply by Ryan Gray

Watching: My anatomy lectures....

Playing: A Short Hike

Drinking: Iced Vanilla and Brown Sugar Latte

Perfume: "Fireside Flurries" by Bath and Body Works

It feels like there's something in the air— a lot of the people around me both in person and online have either been talking about or actively have been withdrawing from socializing as of lately. I can't even be mad, because I've been feeling similarly! I deactivated my Neocities profile for like two days, but as of posting this have reactivated it. I don't want people to feel like they can't keep up with my site updates if they don't use RSS. I have just accepted that I won't have the energy to actively check my Neocities feed for a while, even if I plan on continuing to write blog posts and updating my site. If people decide to unfollow me/unmutual me over this it's whatever. I used uBlock origin's element zapper to hide my Neocities profile's views/follow count a long time ago.

Despite the seemingly social nature of blogging and maintaining a website, I actually see it as a very solitary activity. The point of the World Wide Web is for people to come across other's sites and thoughts, yes. Despite this, to be completely honest, I don't necessarily desire an audience for my blog. Something that I've personally been working on these past few years is relying less and less on external influences in dictating what I do and enjoy. I see maintaining a website and blogging as mediums for expressing myself, not necessarily as a way to socialize with other people. I think that having multiple ways of expressing yourself is important! I use this one to talk about my life in a casual way as if I were catching a friend up on the happenings of my life, without the pressures of maintaining an actual conversation. I find it really therapeutic to make it part of my routine to reflect on my life using blog posts as my medium about every two weeks. I indulge in the fantasy of being perceived alongside the awareness that nobody could be reading this, or caring at all.

Part of the reason why I feel the intense need to be alone is to recharge and figure out who I am again. A few weeks ago a video called "I deleted all my social media and made a website" by lrnjulie showed up on my Youtube recommend. Part of the reason why I chose to watch it was because I wanted to hear about the perspective of shifting over to a personal site over social media from someone who wasn't swayed to make a personal site by exploring Neocities. In it she says "...are we overconsuming inspiration from social media? I think we are because of how social media apps are designed to keep us on there looking for inspiration for way longer than we actually spend creating art. It's like an inspiration overload so none of them really stick and we're not even getting proper time to reflect on them and actually incorporate them into our art". This quote in particular was about art and social media, but I felt it resonate in my soul about my life in general. I'm the type of person who doesn't say no to things, as a result I feel like I've been spending a lot of time doing a lot of things I am lukewarm about instead of doing things that I enjoy. I've felt like I've been spending too much time exploring other people's sites for inspiration rather than working on my own. I feel like I've been spending too much time listening to other people's music recommendations rather than organically discovering what I like. I feel like I've been spending too much time looking at other people's art for inspiration rather than creating my own. I chose to disconnect from social media feeds because I felt exhausted by the need to keep up with other people, yet I keep playing "keeping up with the Jones'" in other aspects of my life. I want to break the cycle. When I think back to my happiest days as a young child, it was because I chose to let my natural curiosity take me where I needed to go, both online and offline. I want to experience life like that again, and for the better or worse it means it means I have to disconnect for a bit.

In regards to life happenings, I had the privilege to run into a friend on campus that hasn't texted me back for about 2 months. One of the rules that I live by is "I don't chase, I attract", so I let myself trust that she'd text me back whenever she was ready. I chose correctly. She looked happy to see me, and apologized for not texting back. She didn't go into details about anything in particular about her life other than mentioning having the worst semester of her life. I didn't want to prod too much if she wasn't going to share organically, so I just let it be. We hung out for an hour just talking. We didn't do much of anything other than that, but I was just happy to know that she was at least okay and in one piece. I have no idea when I'll see or hear from her again, but it was good to have tangible proof that there were no hard feelings between us or anything of the sort. Like I mentioned earlier in this post, sometimes we just need to spend time by ourselves recharging, and that's more than okay.