Peace!
It’s been about ten years since I started this Tumblr account, and nearly two years since I last updated. This has been a document of a specific period of time in my life that I think has ended. I want to close this chapter properly and to hopefully contextualize its contents in a productive way should someone stumble across this account in the future.
Honestly, I started this Tumblr a decade ago to just be a process blog of my own student work while I was attending grad school and it ended up morphing into more of an advice column for better or worse. I don’t think it’s good to keep this going for a lot of reasons.
I’m glad to know that a lot of people found my entries to be useful, or at least entertaining and I’m sure it led to some positive things in my career—but when I look back, I see a naive person growing up in public and I don’t think that was the best thing in the world to go through and it wasn’t as altruistic as was implied.
Rereading old entries, I think there’s advice I gave that was good, and I think there were some exchanges that were selfish, braggadocios, and ungenerous. A lot of times it was merely a reflection of what I was going through in my personal life at the time. I’ve had people over the years thank me for having this Tumblr but to be honest, I cared more about being perceived as helpful more than actually being helpful.
I think over the course of most of my twenties, this account along with my other social media accounts had filled a void that I felt in my heart. I think when you grow up feeling worthless, any sort of attention will feel like a drug and I think starting in the early 2010s—some of the discourse surrounding topics such as race, identity, gatekeeping, felt really affirming and it helped me make sense of some really complicated emotions and feelings in the world. At the time, I was a young designer who had just emerged in the scene and was slowly gaining consciousness about the intersections of his identity. I was thinking out loud and through that, it felt empowering in many ways but at the same time I also relinquished some of the power I had in other ways. It robbed me of the compassion and curiosity I naturally possessed for people. I’m not a confrontational person by nature but felt like I had to be. If you asked me at the time, I could’ve told you that I was speaking up for marginalized people, against the gatekeepers, the elders in the field and I was giving advice to other people with similar backwards and identities on how to navigate a competitive and unforgiving industry—some of that was true. But what’s also true is that it felt good at the time to be mean to people who I felt were mean to me and it felt good to be admired. Talking about the ways in which I was a victim made it harder to grow out of feeling like a victim and it became a weird cycle in many ways.
I don’t want to beat myself up and I’m thankful for most of this, but a lot of it my activity on the Internet was using politics and hot takes as a substitute for therapy and personally I was mapping fundamental feelings of unhappiness onto the idea of a young outsider out to disrupt a field. I’m not young anymore. I was never an outsider. The entire time, by focusing on what I didn’t have, I wasn’t looking at the privileges I did have. I think I have a responsibility to uplift younger and more marginalized voices and make myself helpful—but I don’t want to do it here, because the gestalt that this Tumblr had built up of a scrappy young designer with a chip on his shoulder is no longer accurate of who I am and I’d rather start fresh. It was self-aggrandizing and unhealthy and self-limiting.
Not only that, but what does uplifting someone’s voice really entail? So much damage has been done on the Internet this decade by mistakenly assuming giving something attention is universally helpful. I am a product of a marginalized voice that was given visibility and attention and not all of it was good for me. This decade on the Internet has been all about visibility. Assuming visibility is truly what helps people is a huge assumption. By putting people in a top ten list of Emerging Creatives of Color robs them of the consent, context, and dignity that they deserve. I think I should try to figure out a different way. The past ten years the Internet has been slowly melting into a giant hot take factory. Everyone knows everything. I don’t think I was alone in being a victim and perpetrator of that machine, I think platforms were engineered this way, but I think it makes sense to say that out loud. How ironic that a blog I started to specifically document questions I was asking ended up documenting questions I was answering.
The lessons that I have learned are much more banal than anything else I’ve posted on here but they’re important to me. None of us know what we are doing—myself included. There is unfairness in the world and people directly contribute to that, but accountability and punishment aren’t synonymous and any desire for the punishment of others should be questioned. There are parts of who I am like my ethnicity that I can’t change and people who haven’t always been okay with those parts of me have consciously and unconsciously contributed to my personal suffering, but I’ve also contributed to my own personal suffering by hyper-fixating on those parts of me too.
I’m not writing about this time period out of shame. I’m leaving this thing up. I am okay with a record of ten years of me figuring out a few things in my life. Ultimately, I see my posts and I love myself deeply in a way that I haven’t always have. All I needed was a hug and I eventually got that hug from healthier place. I’m glad at least some of it has helped people but I’m free to move on now. I’ll probably be on Mirror if you need me but I promise you’ll be okay!!!
