This post is part of the IndieWeb Carnival for March, 2024 hosted by Pablo. The theme? “self-expression.”
Preamble: Mom
My mother encouraged me to express myself all the time.
I believe she did this because her own expression was mostly suppressed by her parents. Mostly her mother. But parents are a system and both are complicit.
My mom was also a girl, and Mexican-American in the 1950s and 1960s, when conformity and assimilation were the norm.
Parenting style
And so, my mother did what her own parents didn’t. She encouraged and praised my self-expression.
It is core to my own character to express myself and speak my mind. It’s core for me to encourage others to do so, too.
Living self-expression
This website is very much an embodiment of my core expressiveness. It’s got a lot my own creative output. And I add to it regularly. I seek out ways to express myself. Mixtapes have been the latest addition. But there’s also my cosplay: sewing and crafting. There are at least two Halloween posts about creative food. There’s the candy sushi (the rice is rice crispies and seaweed fruit roll ups!) and a cake that looks like guts (a ribcage of white chocolate).
And I also have talked about depression and grief and elation and pain.
The website contains it all.
I don’t expect people to read it all. The roughly 900,000 words 7000 images are mostly actually for me.
(I just looked up the stat and the average novel has about 100,000 words if various web pages are to be believed)
A journal. A diary.
9 novels worth.
The words and pictures are their own reward.
To help remember.
To know myself.
The future uses of my expression?
If I am lucky as I age I will be able to look up things on this website if my memory fails.
And possibly someday some future historian will read these words in the Internet Archive trying to make sense of a netizen blogger from the late 20th / early 21st century.
But those are future possibilities.
For now my expression is working for me, and I don’t fear to share.
Fearing to share
I live in a historical moment when expression is in danger.
The current US administration has words they would prefer we not use.
I can write something as simple as “Trans women are women” or “Free Palestine” and get political pushback. If I were a corporation who did business with the US Government I might feel pressure to redact those words.
But I am one person. I present as a white man. And have no particular need (that I know of) to adhere to their inane and dangerous ideologies.
They proclaim “free speech” but they mean the other thing.
For now, I am lucky and I feel free to share.
And so I do.
Thanks for reading my self-expression today, whenever you are reading from.
Songs of the day: Expression by Salt-N-Pepa and Express Yourself by N.W.A.
