Side Quest Extra #6 - Vulnerable

Been thinking this week about the amount of information I share online about myself. I've been blogging since I was fourteen. Luckily, those websites have been obliterated into dust. Except one.

I've spoken about this website before but, my God, it's like a time portal into my past. Most of it is broken due to a lack of images. My friend Paris designed most of my websites for me by the time I was 16, as I was crap at it, and she had kindly stepped in to save me. But we liked tiny little pop-out windows and glittery GIFs and frames, so many little frames. On the Wayback Machine, I had to click around the page to find invisible links I knew were there somewhere.

I put so much of myself on that little website. I wanted to go to Canada. I liked Gwen Stefani. I was obsessed with Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. I suffered with insomnia. I was clumsy and often tripped over my own feet. I sucked at standing up for myself but I turned into a raging monster if someone upset my friends. I owned pink Snoopy pyjamas. I loved my friends and family so much.

(A lot of that is still true.)

I posted anything I felt like. Photography, little bits of pixel art I attempted to make, links to my friend's websites. I had a whole page of quotes I loved. Like this one:

Mostly, I wrote little snippets of my life. Like this moment with my parents in the kitchen:

It really is a brief, and lovely, glimpse into what I was like at sixteen: earnest, creative, sociable, and unselfconscious.

The thing is, I had no idea what people could do with that information. Most of it is so benign that I don't imagine any harm could come from it (which is why I'm repeating it here). Some of it displays my immaturity, my outdated thinking, how much growth I had to do. This was before Twitter; I had no idea how people could twist things, that they could take something innocent and transform it into something monstrous.

Like the above conversation with my parents: you could read that and think, blimey, what a horrible person my mother is, to be so snappy and awful. And yet, in context, I know them. My parents swear and snap and wind each other up and get grumpy all the time, but there's no malice in it. They adore each other. They will happily call each other a pillock if the situation warrants it, because they are comfortable enough in their marriage to do so.

Nowadays, whenever I post anything online, I run it through a quick 'could this be wilfully misinterpreted?' filter. Back then, I didn't see the need for it. The internet felt like a safe space, where I could be pretty much anonymous, where nobody would really find me except my friends.

And, of course, I had no idea what certain people would do with photos of me. I never posed provocatively or anything, but even my silly pictures could be used against me. Why did I tell everyone, at the age of sixteen, what my pyjamas were like? That kind of thing makes me shudder now.

I spoke on Twitter recently about an article by Katy Wix on forgiveness. What I love about Wix is her surprising honesty. And that is a cliched thing to say about a writer: they're so honest. I've heard that said about so many writers, but a lot of the time it is a curated, careful kind of honesty. Wix's honesty is genuine and sometimes, startling.

Someone responded to my tweet by saying that they admired Wix for her honesty but they just couldn't be that way. And I get that, it's hard. There's a spectrum, I think, ranging from the guarded writing I do when I don't feel like letting people in, and the line in my head I have marked as 'oversharing'. The best writing I've ever done dances very close to that line, almost to the degree of making me feel slightly uncomfortable. That narrow space is where the really good shit comes from, the writing that stands out in my mind as good, the writing that gets the biggest response from people who resonate with it.

I wonder, sometimes, with the stuff I post on here, and the words I put into other publications. I'm sharing quite a lot of my heart here. And I've put better guardrails in place now. There are things I won't talk about as a blanket rule: specific details about my kids, my beliefs, the inner workings of my marriage, that kind of thing. But I do get quite personal, sometimes. I am that person in real life, too. I like to get to the heart of things. I think one of my strengths (or so I've been told) is that once you push past my shyness you'll find someone who is very open, someone who makes others feel comfortable sharing the deep stuff.

(I have to hang onto this praise because it makes up for my lack of social skills.)

But I write about video games, mostly. Is it okay that sometimes I veer into other topics alongside them? Sex, body image, trauma, I put that out there when it's appropriate, I weave these things into reviews and retrospectives of the games I love, especially on this newsletter. Sometimes, I think I'd be more successful if I got less personal. If I put less of myself into it. I am capable of doing that, but it doesn't exactly set my soul on fire, you know? I just want to be a bit more open and vulnerable and, I guess, stereotypically feminine. I don't think that appeals to everyone. Sometimes I think that I'd have more success with this newsletter if I toned it down a bit, but the thought makes me a bit sad.

I will probably keep reevaluating and adjusting how much I want to share. For me, being vulnerable (to a certain extent) is worth the risk of getting hurt. I've been hurt before, you know? It didn't kill me. For me, the ultimate goal of connecting with people who read my work is so precious that it's worth the potential cost of someone taking something I said the wrong way, or thinking less of me, or whatever.

When I was six or seven, I decided I wanted to be a writer. By the end of primary school, I was set on that. For me, the idea that Jacqueline Wilson or whoever could reach out to me, somehow, that she was able to connect with me on a deep level just because of the words she wrote on a page, that idea was magic, or the closest to magic that I could see in real life. I wanted that. I wanted to be that person for someone else. It's all that's ever driven me to write. That little spark of connection with people I may never meet.

Anyway. That's a nice self-indulgent writerly waffle for you. I'll leave you with this fact I found on the website created by sixteen-year-old me (and fifteen-year-old Paris - shoutout to you, my longest internet friend):

What do you want to be when you're older? A writer/owner of coolest clothes shop in the world ever.

Haha. Well, I think Chris would argue I have so many clothes from Vinted that I could open a clothes shop at this point. But the writer part? That I stuck to, at least.