Tag: imposter syndrome

Categories
Personal Growth The Internet Websites

Add your website to directories

Replied to Promote Your Website Like it was 1998: Old School Web by Brad Brad (indieseek.xyz)

The few tiny search engines and directories that still have a means for you to Add Your URL, need your support by doing just that – submit your URL to them. This helps fight the Big Tech silo duopoly of Google and Bing, Twitter and Facebook.

I haven’t done anything to promote this website or my blog or other websites…and maybe I should 🤔

One part laziness, one part ‘who wants to read my weird junk,’ one part shyness / aversion to attention 🤷‍♀️ It’s a form of (unconscious) self sabotage, doing nothing to get eyes on my work, while also a (not necessarily healthy) means of self protection from fear of criticism and failure. I have a deep-seated fear of looking like an idiot, which isn’t helpful for actually learning 😉 Making this digital garden public has been one step in pushing myself through imposter syndrome, but actually sharing it so people might see it is another 😂

As I’ve been paying more attention to alternative search engines and directory sites, participating in those sites to provide additional content is one way to support those efforts. If I’d appreciate someone else’s website like this, then my site could also be useful to others.

I have been adding my sites as examples on the IndieWeb wiki with this same mindset: I’ve learned from others’ examples, I can pay it forward by adding my small piece. I still feel self-conscious, but remind myself that each exercise of self confidence and visible pride in what I’m doing bolsters my confidence.

Categories
Art and Design Featured Society Writing

Writing Metrics and Capitalism

Replied to Writing Is about the Right Words, not the MOST Words by Lincoln Michel (Counter Craft)

Why are we more comfortable talking about output than art?

Neil Gaiman QTs Scalzi, saying "I wrote Coraline in 50 words a night," in response to Scalzi commenting on a couple people who said he couldn't call himself a full-time writer if he's only working four hours a day, to which he points out that's awesome and also writing is more than typing

Writers are often less comfortable talking about aesthetics than productivity.

I’ve had this feeling about NaNoWriMo for a while, which is why this year I switched to a daily time goal rather than word count. And I didn’t write 50,000 words… but I didn’t need to. What I needed to do was reach the end of my book, which I did. I’ve gotten a lot out of NaNo, including dear friendships, and have nothing to prove anymore.

But I think this is interesting analysis of why it’s proven so successful: it’s easy to measure how much or how long you’ve written. It’s not possible to measure quality. And capitalism drives us towards quantification, towards the tangible.

If people won’t respect your qualitative creativity, maybe they’ll at least respect your quantitative output?

It ties to imposter syndrome, and the fact that honestly IMO it takes about ten years to learn how to tell a story and write a complete work that works, but that’s a long time to feel like you’ve got nothing to show. At least if you have word count that feels real, versus recognizing the shift in your storytelling abilities, learning what writing method works for you, and learning to recognize what is good and what needs work, to be able to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses.

We invest a lot of our identities in the things we make, so it’s not enough to be a writer: we must be a good writer, otherwise we’re wasting our time, under capitalism. And we can’t weigh what makes a good writer, so metrics let us feel more comfortable in the identity.

it’s important to remember that time spent in front of your computer, the number of drafts written, the number of words written… none of those actually mean anything by themselves.

This makes me think too of my feelings about website analytics, and how the ubiquity and normativity of tracking leads us to fall into the trap of tracking stats we don’t have any need or purpose for. What we can measure becomes our focus, because it’s concrete, and leads to the presumption that more is better. It’s easy to be distracted from our ultimate goals by more quantifiable factors.

Categories
Work

LARPing Our Workday

Quoted LARPing your job by Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study)

A few weeks ago, I went on one of my favorite podcasts — The Ezra Klein Show — to talk about burnout, workism, and our relationship to labor. In our conversation, I invoke the idea of “LARPing” your job, a phrase my partner uses to describe the way we try and show evidence that LOOK, OVER HERE, I AM WORKING. (‘LARP’= Live Action Role Playing).

“We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve the place that we’ve found ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that writing for the internet is a vocation that deserves steady payment. At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: we still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.”

— Anne Helen Petersen

I have struggled with this a lot since working from home during the pandemic.