It's been a while! Hello, mid-March! February was a busy month for me, and I think taking a break from my blog was a good idea amidst everything, but now that I'm missing it I find it as good a time as any to come back.

Recently, I made the decision to close and log out of my art Twitter, which I'd been using fairly regularly over the past three years. I made the account private and left a thank-you note to the people in my fandoms I had fun talking and sharing stuff with, but no obvious paper trail to where else I could be found. It's not the first time I've up and left an online presence, but the first time I've done so without leaving so much as an email address.

I try to leave trails wherever I go because I appreciate when others do that for me, whether I am a friend or a fan or both. I get sad when I have no way to get in touch with people I'd shared memories with or whose art I really loved¹. Specifically for online friendships or acquaintance...ships?, it seems also like the polite thing to do, or something that says "I enjoyed my time with you enough to recreate it in another form"—to abandon all forms of contact entirely seemed cold.

So I felt guilty about how happy I was to disappear.

I do versions of this even on places I still frequent. I delete Instagram and Discord off my phone regularly, turn off any functions that show if you're online/if you're typing/if you've read something, leave messages in the notifications until I have the energy to touch them. I lurk quietly and send anonymous messages (nice ones, mind you) to Tumblrs I like instead of making myself a known entity they can expect to hear from regularly. I keep my accounts separate from each other. I leave my blog for weeks without notice.

What is it about being a person online that exhausts me, despite my having lived on the internet for almost 20 years? I grew up in this space, spent most of my youth befriending strangers across the world on deviantArt and Youtube, and yet now my online social battery is next to non-existent, for both people I know in real life and exclusively online. I do not think it is good to think of replying to friends as a task to tick off my to-do list.

I'm still wrangling with these feelings. I think part of it is social anxiety, and another part is admittedly emotional immaturity—it feels escapist, the need to silo myself off from people even if they're ones I already know I like. Some part could be an exhaustion attributed to how digital interactions work these days—endless notifications and the expectation that you are always available. Some reasons are understandable, and others need to be reflected on.

And of course, I'm likely projecting these stresses—no one cares that much if I don't respond for a couple of days. No one cares if I don't post any art for a while. The stuff I do online is all for fun, and most friends recognize this. People have reassured me as much, and I appreciate it. But I guess this is a leftover response from being neck-deep in fandom on sites with unforgiving algorithms, and from time in corporate where everything is urgent. As long as you're there, you have no excuse for not giving people what they want from you, or else be punished. So better to just not be there.

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Ack, well, anyway. That sure was a lot! Just a glimpse into my dark reality. (I'm joking.)

I'm trying to find good middle ground solutions for my neurotic behavior, at least in spaces that I still like to inhabit. It's an ongoing thing I'm not expecting to solve immediately, but writing about it helps me reflect on it and posting has the side benefit of... I don't know, at least letting people know I overthink shit? Unsure.

The good thing about disappearing for a while is I usually come back to the thing feeling refreshed, so in that way, I guess it's not all that insane—it's why people take vacations. I'm excited to be blogging again, for however long this season of enthusiasm lasts, until my next disappearance!

Here's my dog.

(Also, hey, it's been over a year since I started my blog! Wahoo! Nice little milestone for someone who's struggled to keep up any long-term writing practice in the past.)

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1. I am more understanding of people who abandon their art/writing/fannish presence, though. I could talk about this at length, but that's for another post.↩