In advance, this is more a stream of consciousness piece than anything else. Apologies if it reads messy or incoherent.

Something that I became fixated upon a long time ago was making it easy for people to get to know me. I spent a lot of time thinking about my answers to common questions that would come up, things that I’d do in my free time - the dreaded “What’s a fun fact about you?” question.

I wanted to do this because for a long time, I struggled with giving answers to these questions. A part of me felt like my answers weren’t the greatest. Another part of me didn’t want to get into a conversation about something I didn’t know.

This turned out to be a terrible idea. For more reasons than one, but in large part due to the inauthentic answers that it lead to. The problem is that how you answer those questions is more important than what your answer is. If you spend a longer time thinking about what your favorite book is, that in it of itself is (probably) more interesting than whatever answer you end up giving.

To know someone, means to know why and how they think about things - not always the what that amounts.

After I figured out this was a terrible idea, I was left with heaps of self discovery about myself. Favorite music, books, clothing, TV shows - you name it. So the question became, what do I do with all of this?

This was, initially, the motivation that I had for my own website. It was originally a place for me to document everything about me. Nowadays, it has become much more than that - and for better or for worse, my “professional” and “personal” sides have sort of become indistinguishable from each other.

And when I mean everything, I really mean everything. There is almost nothing that I keep of my personal website, I have pages for almost everything. I do this because I think about expressing my interests and life on a sort of line. On one end, is not sharing anything about yourself - and on the other, is sharing everything about yourself for the whole world to see.

My personal website serves as some sort of benign middle ground, it gives me comfort to know that my ideas and life are out there - but not to the extent that everyone knows about it.

That speaks, I think, to something much more interesting - which I didn’t really know I wanted before. There is something extremely unique in sharing your life with people who you may not know, or may never meet. Unique, in the sense, that they will learn about you - entirely through what is on a website. Social media would have you think this is a bad thing - and in many ways, it’s true. So much of what you see online is fabricated to display a certain lifestyle, to convey to you a certain perception of someone, so that there is no room for interpretation. A feed of posts from someone may make it, painfully obvious, that they are a certain type of individual.

What has been lost, is the room for interpretation. I think what’s so beautiful about personal websites is that the reader can make their own mind up about your thoughts, and what you are. Maybe this is because text is a better median, or maybe it’s because there is beauty in the brevity. In the absense of constant information, is short prose and descriptions to get to know someone.

I sometimes walk a fine-line between my personal website becoming too much like what I try to avoid in the past paragraphs. What reminds me weather or not I’m on the right track is the following. If someone were to read my page and then talk to me about it after, would I know it’s me? I think it’s like that at this current point, but for a good chunk of social media - many would struggle to say yes.