Earlier today I clicked on the link to this site from my Instagram bio. I was showing someone (someone a couple decades older than I) how the whole “link in bio” thing works. Right at the top of landing page, just where I left it, was my last post. How could it possibly have been from so long ago? I wondered, embarrassed. It was a doodle of a stranger.
Between the podcast, social media (especially the aforementioned Instagram, where I control a small army of accounts), and my other writing work, I have this feeling that I am generating work. Work, work, work…or at the very least, “content.” Simultaneously, I worry constantly that I am failing to share my voice with the world in a meaningful way — when I say I “worry” about this, I mean that it is the foremost shape that my anxiety takes these days, 50% the feeling that I am shouting into a void, 50% concern that I am not shouting loud enough.
Having a blog is pretty old school. I have never been good about posting regularly, and I have often thought about using the blog as a repository for all of the things I’m making. Or documenting. Or, in a more recent development, collecting.
For the past (nearly) two years, ever since my pilgrimage to England (much documented on this blog) I have been “collecting” photographs of wallpaper. And for the past couple months, once a week, I have been posting images from that ever-growing collection on Instagram with the hashtag “#wallpaperwednesday). Much to my surprise, people (mainly my friends, whom I'd never known to be wallpaper enthusiasts) seem pretty into it.
Yesterday, I was at a coffee meetup with some volunteering colleagues I don’t know very well outside of social media. One of them asked me to explain the whole wallpaper thing. Suddenly I found myself speaking at length about how and why I had started collecting and posting these images. Maybe it was just because it was an easy conversation starter, but I and half the gathered group went on to talk about wallpaper — and social media — for quite some time. I posited that I think wallpaper may be making a comeback. “It’s kind of old-fashioned, but in a cool way that’s novel. It’s like record players or cursive…wallpaper is analog.” I paused, proud of my observation until I saw its flaw. I amended: “I guess all walls are analog.”
At one point, someone described the wallpaper thing as “your passion.” Well, that escalated quickly! I thought it was just something I like. I like a lot of things. But…a passion? Maybe it is a passion of sorts, but if so, that escalates many of my interests to passion-level. Perhaps all that is part and parcel of my void-shouting-angst: more passions filling me up than one body can comfortably contain, and still only 24 hours in the day, only 7 days in a week, only this finite quantity of weeks in a lifetime. Wall-wise, I feel more passionate about street art and murals than wallpaper (out of thin air, I have been fantasizing about PAINTING murals of late). One of the gathered suggested I implement “#muralmodays” and I might just. I would promise to post about it here when I do, but given my track record, I wouldn’t trust me to start posting regularly if I were you. But who knows. Maybe blogs will make a comeback; everything old is new again.
