Lately I’ve been thinking about finding platforms other than this blog to document my health sojourns. Perhaps something more audio-visual would do the trick. Starting a Youtube channel or revamping my nearly defunct Instagram for the purpose or podcasting. There are a lot of benefits to documenting things publicly (sidenote: I just forgot how to spell publicly, so that’s fun) like accountability and potential engagement with others on the same path as you. You could find a community of like-minded people and feel like you’re not so alone as you wade through the forest of better health to the…lake of good health? I don’t know, let’s just go with it. And for self-centered jerks like me, it’s fun to hear yourself talk about, well, yourself and pretend like everyone’s listening to you. Case in point, this blog.

There are drawbacks, though, and they can be considerable. Visual mediums are very unforgiving at times. If you have a setback and you hate everything and it lasts longer than you want it to, it’s out there for the world to see. Not to be self-aggrandizing or anything and think that hundreds of thousands of people will flock to your gram or your channel to watch your progress, but a larger viewership than you expect IS one eventuality of putting your life out on the internet.

I think the other issue is that nowadays, I feel like everyone has their own gimmick. I don’t just mean companies, I mean individuals. There’s all this pressure to develop a catchphrase, a hashtag, a personal brand. People make Instagrams for their pets and give the pets catchy hashtags. Nothing wrong with that, of course, if that’s your bag then it’s your bag (I have made a horse Facebook page or two in my day) but sometimes to me it just seems so…I don’t know, so superficial. You get this cute puppy and immediately slap it up on Instagram with five hashtags and are posing it and brand-dropping all over the place, possibly hoping to get sponsorships or whatnot. I know that’s not everyone’s motivation, some people just really like to share pictures of their pets with the world because they think their pets are the best. I personally believe my dog is the best creature on the planet, so there’s that. He doesn’t have an Instagram of his own, though.

I’m not really sure where I was going with this. They’re just general feelings, I suppose and I apologize for it being all over the place. No sponsorships for me. The most genuine-feeling content I find comes from people who don’t think about all that stuff. They’re just carving out a little place in the universe because it’s fun for them and they enjoy doing it. I’m still entertaining the idea of starting something else because it might be fun and give me a boost of phantom outer accountability. Even moreso expressly knowing that no one is watching or listening. Why do we put things out on the internet at all? I often ask myself that, but I don’t ever really have good answers. I suppose I do it just to get it out of my brain, but the idea that someone else out there I do not know even in the most obscure way could read it and find value in it (or hate it, idk) is a thrilling one. It’s why I started writing and posting my fanfic back in the day, anyway. Virtually no one in my real existence knew I did it or would ever read it, but random internet people did! And some of them liked it! As someone who thrives on external validation and obligations to keep going (an unhealthy habit, thank you narcissistic parent conditional love child-rearing model) it was such a rush. People approved of me! They thought it was funny! Good! Me good.

Perhaps this is an extension of that fanfic idea. No one in my real life would know or care what I was doing, but maybe someone on the internet would get a kick out of me talking about trampolines or posting pictures of bell peppers or something. I don’t know, the more I write about it the less like a good idea it sounds right now, so we’ll see. If you think I should do it, phantom internet audience, please leave a comment down below, like and subscribe to my channel and….

Right.