This, Distilled
Online identity and personas
The need to create
The joy of notebooks
TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook
Distribution and platforms
Interaction and engagement
Prioritisation and restoration
I am fascinated by elements of identity. When I was studying for my research degree, I started out with a theoretical underpinning broadly based on concepts of identity, before realising that grounding my thesis in place theory was far more appropriate and accurate to approaching my research questions as they evolved.
Not unsurprisingly given my research studies also focussed on digital ethnography, I find expressions of identity online particularly interesting (‘online’ here being a somewhat lazy catch-all term for sharing things on the internet or in digital form, often via social media).
As you know, I periodically suffer from wanting to disappear from all things. Perhaps ‘suffer’ isn’t the right word, indicating as it does a negative connotation. Nevertheless, the fact is that overwhelming urge to disappear – to shake things up – is part of my neurological wiring.
I was idly musing recently whether this was in some way linked with the fact that our expressions of identity online are only ever part of who we are. I don’t mean the stylised snippets of our lives we share, I mean the broader persona we build for ourselves. I am not the only one to acknowledge that the whole digital us is still just a fraction of our true selves. I enjoy sharing the oddities of my family life (there are many), and I often put a humorous slant on things. That is genuinely who I am in many ways (try growing up in a large family without a robust sense of humour), but obviously I don’t share any times that, reaching the end of my tether, I grumpily stomp around the kitchen in disbelief that at least 47% of my day seems to revolve around doing the same repetitive and frustrating tasks, and honestly can’t everyone just tidy up after themselves, and is it really so hard for people to just take a little more personal responsibility…
I am a positive person, I get excited about a lot of things, and I thoroughly enjoy living life that way. I also know that, as a person, I am a lot. For many years, I have joked that I have two speeds: gogogo and sleep. It’s pretty much true, it is just the way I am. You might think this makes for an exhausting life – and I don’t deny, that is true, I suppose – but it makes for a pretty grand one, too. I also get more energy the more I do, which is often something that is misunderstood by people focussing on a traditional concept of ‘burnout’. The times I feel listless and life feels wasted are those times when I have not managed to create anything. The reason I enjoy my Scribbles and Sketches seasonal notebooks so much is that they represent separate projects I am interested in giving an airing (and deciding whether to pursue further), but also because the publication schedule is manageable and suits who I am: jumping all in for a month at a time, then spending the next two months reflecting and preparing. It is a mix of consistent sharing allowing for constant creativity that suits my life (I work full-time and have two young children). If I don’t create, I suffer. That isn’t being dramatic – it is an honest self-assessment built over time reflecting on periods of my life when I have and have not managed to dedicate time to creative projects. (Similarly, I thrive from contact with other people, both digitally and in-person).
This post is one of several in my Assorted Cogitations notebook. All my notebooks represent things of interest to me and works in progress. Don’t expect polish. So, it would make perfect sense for me to leave this stream of consciousness here. Except, there is a very specific reason why I have been thinking about these things recently.
This week, I shared an introductory post for my new project, TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook. The project is something of a departure from what I have posted elsewhere on the internet in recent times (though less of a departure from my earlier ShiverWriggle fiction), and as a result will introduce aspects of my creative life quite different to those with which most of the people who read my words are familiar. It took me a long, long time to decide how I wanted to manage the project, both in terms of platforms and in terms of identity. I couldn’t even decide whether to share the project under my own name, or to share it anonymously (the reasons for this quandary will be the subject of one of my early TessaHedron posts in the new year).
Over the years, I have sketched out entire routes through which I could not only share these stories anonymously, but do so as a kind of experiment in seeing what it is possible to drum up without a former presence, or a clear affiliation with a specific author. Such an experiment still appeals to me, but I have decided to share TessaHedron under my own name, albeit paywalled so not immediately accessible to everyone.
I love experimenting with these sorts of things, even if it does appear that over the years I have done everything I can to (accidentally or otherwise) hamper my attempts to maintain an audience. I culled and then deleted my first Facebook account because I became slightly horrified with my friends list running into several hundreds, only to set one up for my research studies shortly afterwards. I then deleted that one after my studies were completed. (I think there may even have been a third account in the timeline somewhere?) I left Twitter without providing details of where else to find me other than an email address (which, as we all know, is too much work for many people). I joined Bluesky a year or so ago, but my heart just wasn’t in it, and I didn’t really bother to try and make an effort in finding people there. I mothballed ShiverWriggle some time ago, and took most of the posts offline. Similarly, I have archived years’ worth of posts on my personal website. I was a very early adopter of Substack, only to then leave the platform. Earlier this year, I closed down another site I maintained sporadically for a while. Over the years, I have maintained and subsequently closed down at least three newsletters.
At the moment, I am enjoying Substack (both my ongoing projects, Scribbles and Sketches and Simply This, and the Notes function, even if I am comfortably inconsistent there). I like the set-up I have here on my website with these notebooks. I like my very low-key newsletter. And, despite losing hundreds and hundreds of potentially interested followers over the years, I am quite comfortable with the fact that my followers are only in the tens, because what I am doing is on my own terms. I have always taken the route I felt I should take due to my personal morals and beliefs, even if that meant restricting the number of people who might see what I write. I mention this not as a moral high ground thing, but because it is incredibly freeing to be able to know that my words won’t be held at political ransom at any point.
There is also another reason why I turned my back on so many consistent opportunities to share words. In many cases, these came with history, a digital footprint that was traceable back through many years of my own personal development and, therefore, many different personal identities. These were and are all parts of me, but they weren’t necessarily who I have become (or, rather, who I have become to date – who knows what the future brings). It’s not that there are any worrying secrets hidden away there – nothing quite so dramatic – but I became uncomfortable with people having access to my histories, being able to take a view on who I am now based on what I have chosen to share publicly (or less publicly, but still chose to share) over the last – yeesh! – twenty years.
I own my website, and everything will ultimately be available here. I have plans to migrate my Scribbles and Sketches content in due course, once it has been shared on Substack, and I am also going through my old social media archives to repost some of my more interesting snippets, too.
I have long been concerned about how people become trapped within specific platforms, because they have tethered themselves too tightly. What starts out well, as a helpful and fun tool, often sours in a world seemingly obsessed with growth metrics. In the past, I have dithered about deleting accounts because there were elements I still enjoyed, but eventually the balance shifts too far, or you realise you can’t morally continue using something you previously loved. There is much more to say about this: the fact that there can be some form of sense of loss involved in doing this, and the fact that people can become (or at least feel) more isolated as a result. We need a more nuanced conversation about the effect that this has on communities and individuals, more than a binary good/bad view or the anti-tech evangelism that seems to permeate throughout such discussion.
Partly as a result of this, I have been thinking a lot about what genuine interaction means in this post social media world, including (somewhat ironically) how we can use the tools that proliferated with Web 2.0 to create meaningful connections.
Allowing comments on my website is one thing I flip back and forth over. To be honest, it’s more the management of spam that irritates me than anything else, even with All The Plugins. Allowing comments would mean I would make engagement as frictionless as possible (albeit with an initial set-up in some instances). But is frictionless always best? Yes, we might miss out on the metrics (it is easy – and very much appreciated! – to click a little image of a heart, even to share something on another or the same platform), but quantity isn’t better than quality. There is what I suspect is a psychological, if slightly cosmetic, chasm in expecting people to open their email client, type in an address, and send an unsolicited message. That seems so much more personal than remaining within the same platform; but if someone puts their thoughts out into the ether – hopefully especially on such personal websites as this, where I make no secret of the fact I enjoy collaboration and discussion – such emails aren’t unsolicited at all. They are often a joy (even if some people can’t respond to all of them), assuming no-one makes it weird. People used to handwrite a letter, find an envelope, buy a stamp, figure out where to send it to, and take it to the nearest postbox. Compared to that, sending a quick appreciative email is nothing.
All of this comes back to who it is we are, and how we want to engage with the world. Our actions – what we choose to do and what we choose not to do – are so much more revealing than our intentions, and even our words. I have so many things I want to do, but I need to prioritise so life in general doesn’t end up eating me up. I am trying to be so much more conscious of every decision I make, what that says about me, and what it says about my values. Please don’t interpret this to be a purest statement, where every minute has to be catalogued and measured in terms of benefits; at least, not unless you take into account the things that are good for the soul and for recuperation. I have worked hard over the years at getting better at relaxing rather than crashing, and I’ll be damned if someone tries to guilt me into feeling bad about this; so I would hate for this to be misunderstood (as an aside, I really do suggest you subscribe to the Idler if you are struggling and need some encouragement with identifying the good things in life without metrics and hustle).
All of this rambling stream of consciousness is to say that, over the next year, you will be seeing an increase in activity on this here website. I’m not saying too much, as I have learnt over the years not to promise too much too early, more to prevent my own personal disappointment and overwhelm than anything else. After all these years, I am finally getting better at realising what I want to tune out and disregard, and what I want to do and be. Rest assured, I will be doing all this on my own terms and, alongside the increase in words, I will (perhaps paradoxically) be taking many more moments to restore myself in a way that suits my own personal neurological wiring.
Find Me Elsewhere
My newsletter, Vignettes, will always include a round-up of the various digital haunts I have been frequenting over the previous months, as well as an indication of where I might be the following month.
I host seasonal notebooks under the banner of Scribbles and Sketches, four a year, each lasting a calendar month and following a single theme, which may be predominantly textual or predominantly visual.
I am currently hosting a year-long project, Simply This, featuring suggestions of fun and interesting things to do. Bursts of nostalgia, old-fashioned fun in its simplest state, and a not insignificant amount of cheerful daftness.
I am sporadically active on Substack Notes.
I have just launched my new project for 2026: TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook. I’ll be sharing weekly posts from January 2026, all associated with my fiction project, TessaHedron. It will be an exercise in creativity rather than specifically chronological storytelling, including all manner of things relating to worldbuilding, writing, editing, and distribution in their broadest forms. It’s free to sign-up until the end of 2025.