#whythisblog

[r0h1tpathak-blog]

how it started...

About 3-4 years back, I was in a bad state. Hated my job, was putting in crazy effort in my job with zero returns. The brand wasnt doing well. Didn’t connect with my boss. Didnt like the work I was doing - and my bosses kept saying it so. Didnt help that it wasn’t working out with my boss that time. Stressed and flailing. 

I kept blaming myself for this situation. And others. Why was it happening to me? why does it always happen to me? look at others - they are moving ahead. they are killing it. And I am here, and I will be failure. What will happen to me, my career? my family? 

I was planning to quit everything, and couldn’t.

The one thing that has helped me to get out of that rut, and more importantly be happier now, was my love for reading. I am not a big fan of self help, and I kept myself away from all these self improvement books with a 10 feet pole. Perhaps I was desperately looking for help, or the conditions arose such that I started reading philosophy. 

Now, I always thought that there is no point in studying philosophy - its an intellectual farce that would get one nowhere. It is hopeless at dealing with the practicalities of life: someone who can explain the most complicated passages of Hegel’s philosophy, but can’t work out how to boil an egg. 

And yet, as I started reading, I felt a rush of Insights that turned me around. Studying philosophy gave me a good way of learning to think more clearly about a wide range of issues, including the situation I was in. It gave me a clarity of thought that I lacked before, and perhaps that was the biggest cause of my misery. It made me believe in a well examined life, is a well lived life - and gave me more parameters to define my happiness rather than what I was conditioned for.

I came across two philosophies in this journey, which are are eerily close to each other, given that they were born in different countries more than 2500 years ago. Stoicism and Buddhism. 

Over the last two years, I have dappled with both of these philosophies, and leaning more towards Buddhism over time. 

This blog is a collection of my insights as I take this journey into the well examined life. Its the collection of those moments where my brain goes Aha!. So I keep a record of the purity of those moments, and share with others the clarity I have in those moments. 

more to come, don’t wait for it. 

[behindwithlovelilyrose]

The motivation

I finally decided now is the time to roll up my sleeves and do this thing myself. This “thing” means customizing a WordPress theme to allow for better responsive design of my blog, and better UI for reader experience and better ways to monetizing. So many reasons to work on my blog website as a web developer and not just the fashion content creator.

Screenshots of my blog currently (desktop and mobile views):

For my career development

I’m a proud engineer, and what do engineers do? They build things themselves. I thought about the idea of outsourcing this to a contractor to do this job so I can use my time focusing on creating the fashion content. However, for several reasons I talked myself against it. One, a project like this is not cheap if outsourced, and my blog is not bringing in that kind of income yet to justify the expense. Second, this would be a great way for me to build up my profile as a developer and give me an opportunity to work on a side project. Third, in the future when I need support or tweaks to the design, it’s additional expenses. So why not just do it myself and fix it myself?

For a fully customizable blog design

WordPress is great. It makes it relatively easy to control my blog content. It also allows many plugins to customize your blog. But with my knowledge in UI, I don’t want to stop there.

Mobile first, desktop second. 

Even though the mobile version of my blog is not entirely terrible, it’s still lacking some features I’d like to have. For example there is not a way to hide the popup asking readers to like my Facebook page. This could be annoying to fans who have already liked my FB and this popup is covering almost half of their screen, preventing them from seeing my actual blog underneath it. If I’m going to attract my Instagram followers to my website, how am I going to do that if my site looks like crap on a mobile device (where most of Instagram users are)?

Responsive design

We no longer live in the tech world where a well designed website is just static text and images. If you have been on websites where things move around as you scroll, that’s the responsive design I’m talking about. When a reader first visits my page, I want my branding to be the first thing they see. The name of my blog to tell them what website they’re on, the colors, the theme to present what the blog is all about. Then, as a reader scrolls down my content, the blog header might collapse to a smaller size to make room for the blog posts. What can I do with the empty white spaces on the two sides? Can I utilize that to show case stunning photography of my outfits, or use it to promote my other content? If this design works at all, it will need to work in both desktop and mobile versions

Better shop page

How do I make money from blogging? Affiliation is one part of it. And to attract readers to browse items I pick out, I need a better shop page. I want readers to be able to shop for items by category, by price tag, or by occasion. And I need an easy way for me to add these items as they become trendy. How to make this happen, I’m not sure. But this is something I would like in place.

I know all of this is ambitious and a lot of work for a one person project, considering I’m a mom, have a busy full time job and a fashion blog to keep up. This would technically be my 4th job. Perhaps the next step is for me to assess the scope of all this work, draw a timeline and cherry pick which features I want first. I also see this project as a never ending side work for myself, which isn’t a bad thing. I could always improve the blog more and more. But I could also cap a time limit on the project. But at least these are the reasons behind all this work. This journal is for me document along the way the technical changes behind the website of With Love Lily Rose. So stay tuned!

[thirtydaystil30-blog]

Day 1/30: Well, here we are

30 days til I leave my 20s. I’ve never been one for journals, and never made it past page 10 of a diary before starting to doodle or ignore it completely. I have begun blogs with the best of intentions and left them to wither away into the ether of the internet.  But. Seeing as I’m on the cusp of dementia (moving into my third decade and all) I figure that I should write down at least 30 of the most memorable things that happened in my 20′s. Good, bad, humiliating, exciting...let’s do this. 

And, you know, if I do give up...it’s only 30 days, right? 

xx

sb

[carolineswishes]

Why I have this blog

I’m a teenager dealing with a lot of shit right now and I need a place to vent negative things!

I’m 18, I have anxiety (GAD and panic disorder), depression, Bipolar with Psychotic features, and OCD tendencies. 

I hope that if you have mental illness you’re treating yourself right (when you can) and staying safe (when you can’t). 

[artlifecrisis]

The Short Version ..

This Tumblr is mostly an organizational resource for my own artist journey. After various personal traumas, I found myself unable to create art at all. Recently, I’ve found myself interested in trying to start again, though I’m a bit discouraged as to how my skills have deteriorated, and I’ve decided to try and teach myself how to write and create again.

More than likely, I won’t post my own work on this blog. I have a DeviantART account for that, which will be linked in the “Directory” page if you’re interested.

This Tumblr is my journey of rediscovering my inner artist, and trying to heal.

Once upon a time I had more here, one day I might rewrite it. 

[dersebblog-blog]

WhyThisBlog

The formulate in writing helps me to sort and structure my thoughts. Besides writing forces me to deal with the topic for a longer period of time and on a deeper level. My professor would conclude with the sentence: "The identification and exact description of a problem is fifty percent of the solution." Furthermore, I hope through the factor of publicity I take more trouble and I work more continuously on the topic than I would write a private diary or a wiki.

On the other side I don't start with this blog to satisfy my attention deficit, to get rich, or famous ...

To be honest what a didactic bullshit, of course I want to get rich and I do it mostly for fun! Penis!

[shaming-the-devil]

Why Shame: A Tardy Intro to the Why of Shaming, the Devil

About 8 years ago or so, I started getting interested in shame.

I was taking a class on theological methods and randomly read two books -- The Colonization of Psychic Space by Kelly Oliver, and Saving Shame by Virginia Burrus -- that described shame and talked about its role in breaking people down, but also its role in building people -- and communities -- up. It might have ended right there, except this idea about shame kept nagging at me. And I really didn’t know why. 

Now, after a lot of readings, a lot of doctoral studies and a lot of therapy, I’ve come to realize that my interest in shame has come from a twofold place -- all the shame and shaming I’ve experience in my life, and the utter silence we have in the broader U.S. society about shame. Shame is communally dealt out in super-size quantities, but on a whole shame is an individual meal that gets choked down in silence. Shame is borne and endured without speaking of it. And yet, there tends to be a recognition that shame is something that everyone is grappling with and no one understands. 

“That’s great!” people say when I tell them I’m writing a dissertation about shame. “That’s fascinating! I’m so glad you’re doing this work!”

Which is usually followed up by the comment: “We just don’t have enough shame in our society.”

And what they mean by that is, they see young people flaunting their sexuality, young people expressing themselves through their clothes, piercings and tattoos, and young people cursing or talking freely about things that used to be kept on the down low in their day. What they mean is that they hope I will find a way to make people behave within the societal behavior parameters that shame was used to police. 

Much rarer, I get the comment: “Good. Because I realize that I have all this shame in my life, and I don’t know how to talk about it. And it’s killing me. It’s killing us as a society.”

And that’s the why of this project. How do we talk about shame? What is it? How does it function? How can we articulate what we feel when we experience shame? Is shame good or bad, confining or transformative? More importantly -- How can we learn to recognize shame when we see it? How is shame used as a political, social and economic tool to manipulate behaviors and societal transformation? How can we recognize our own shame versus shame that is imposed upon us? And why does this make a difference?

This blog is meant to serve as the warehouse of readings and reflections on shame and shaming, as I research and write my dissertation. It also will attempt to provide a space for public theology about shame and shaming, to provide some words and concepts about shame, so that people can talk about it together. Most importantly for me, it’s just a way for me to keep straight in my head the mass quantities of readings as I sort through them for dissertation chapters. It’s more fun to write for an audience, even of 1, than it is to think to myself in a notebook. But what I want to do is learn about shaming, along with others, so that both the act of public intellectualism -- of being able to think out loud in public about issues that matter -- and the idea of shame and shaming themselves are no longer locked away behind a mystified veil. The idea behind Crying Shame is to point at shame and shaming, and to talk about it out loud, to break its silencing power, and turn it toward reflection, renewal and redemption. 

[dreamavenues]

Why This Blog

The answer to that is actually very simple hahah. I realized I do better when I broadcast my goals to others. It makes me feel more motivated to do better and I feel like I get more support and who else would I want support from if not my followers and friends here? You're all the most supportive people I've met and I can't imagine not being able to share this with all of you.

Really. There's nothing mroe to it than that ahah.