more ironic

Like every other person on the internet, I do have Facebook and MySpace accounts (the latter of which I try to use as rarely as possible, because of how it seems to spawn a good number of pages that make me feel I’ve gone blind and attract a “Look at Me, I Party and I’m Awesome!” crowd). However, I purposely don’t provide a link to my website on those profiles. Most of the people I’ve added have met me at some point in “real life”, and it’s all too easy to combat boredom by just clicking names to see what various acquaintances are up to.

What I don’t want is for people to just show up here, read one entry, and think something along the lines of, “So Elea’s emo now.” Snap judgments at what kind of person I’ve become is something I’d like to avoid. I don’t deny that I ramble and navel gaze an awful lot (and yes, I’m definitely “emo” at times), but there’s also a million other shades to my personality, some of which may never be seen through what I post online. People are complex and difficult to box into neat little categories. And yes, it’s simple to just Google my name and find this page, but at the least, it’ll be one extra step to go through. I suppose what I really meant to say all along is that if somebody really wanted to know what kind of person I truly am, reading my weblog would only cover a bit of it.

Continue reading…

It’s not a secret that I used to suffer from very low self-esteem. It was the result of many factors, as most cases are, but the sad thing is that it created a fundamentally flawed way of thinking. I believed that because people didn’t treat me well, that I wasn’t a good person, and that I didn’t deserve to be treated well. I’d try to envision their point of view and rationalize why they were behaving that way, and in the end, I’d come around to blaming myself. But the thing is, I can’t control what other people do, think, or feel and I can’t point the finger at myself all the time. They can have a litany of legitimate excuses for their behavior, yet sometimes the most important thing might be that…I deserve better. Otherwise, it was never really friendship in the first place.

I know it may be annoying to have to go through a splash page before finding the blog now, but somehow, having that little screen just makes me more comfortable with writing again. It means that people who want to visit just to see how I design won’t be faced with my personal thoughts unless they purposely click. The new setup, however, isn’t a guarantee that I’ll necessarily be a) more interesting or b) less busy (with either legitimate work or being distracted by other pretty shiny things on the internet), but we can always hope.

There are so many things that I hadn’t been blogging about, topics that I was afraid to broach (including how I discovered early in the year that birth control pills and I really don’t mix well together), but since I’m working on self-improvement overall this summer, I’m also learning to be better about asserting myself (in appropriate situations, of course). My new mindset toward blogging is…I can always go back and give myself a kick in the pants for being stupid/whiny/fill in your own obnoxious attribute here later, so I shouldn’t worry too much about the quality of my entries. No one’s fascinating all the time…right?

Things to do this weekend: Harry Potter book release (YAY!) and Wordcamp! Plus, completely recover from my sore throat. I totally forgot to appreciate how much work swallowing, breathing, and speaking actually is, but thank you sickness, now I recall.