I left my blog for a bit for a few reasons: Mainly, as with many of you, I had some safety concerns with returning to posting too soon after the wave of hostile attention my blog was receiving, and I had to figure out how to bolster my internet safety.
I know most of you are aware of the post that 0t3 blog made to harass our whole community back in January, but I’m not sure how many of you saw the other post they made, about me and my blog specifically. (Linking it here for those seeking context so that they DON’T scroll through that blog to find it, but for real do not interact with that post or user any further. The less we get involved with them, the better.) Anyway, although I doubt their criticisms of me are at all in good faith or worth taking seriously (given the rest of their blog and the way they’ve treated everyone else), it still made me aware of a potential problem for the future, which is that:
The wave of harassment our community has been facing is probably a marker of the level of visibility we have reached on the internet, and I wanted to take some time to figure out how I’m going to navigate that increased visibility in the future. In other words, this community seems to be on the cusp of breaking containment and becoming known to the rest of the world— and I have realized that, as a result, the scope of people with eyes on my blog will surely change, which has prompted me to regroup and reassess what it is I do here accordingly. To be honest, I also needed a break from the internet for the sake of my mental health.
So, I’ve been going back and forth about where I see myself in the future of this community.
On the one hand, this community is so precious and important to me, and I want to be as involved here as possible to help continue to build space for it.
On another hand— the reality is that I am no professional debater or essayist, and in many ways, I don’t feel equipped to be (or even have the intention to be) a central spokesperson/representative for an entire demographic of people, which is how outsiders were beginning to see me. Especially in an environment like this where the spotlight and stakes are much bigger if and when I mess up, I don’t think it would be responsible for me to act outside of my skillset. While I have always been committed to accuracy here, and done my best not to speak more on any topic than I felt my knowledge of it allowed, and have always made it clear that I am learning as I go— the situation has shifted now with the increased visibility of our community, and I have come to feel like my education and abilities just aren’t adequate anymore to meet that new scope of activism.
So… how to move forward with my blog. I’m not sure. I think I’m still figuring that out. I think, at least for now, I’ll probably keep a lower profile. I have SO MANY queued posts I’ve been dying to share with you guys, and a lot of reblogs to catch up on, so I’ll probably start there. I’m not sure what to do with the discussion/information posts I have planned, but I might wait for a bit before posting those to test the water.
I began this blog as a hobby project to simply express my experiences, to give myself a space for my thoughts and feelings about being GNC, and to open that space up to others so that we could find some solace in each other’s company. My initial intention with this blog was to use it as a personal social media account, and maybe coin a word or two to make it easier to communicate things in my posts and connect with others over shared experiences. From now on, I will probably return to that initial vision. I think I’ll still stick around to help a little bit with documenting and providing resources, like for definitions of the language used in the community, but other than that I will return to posting more casually.
TLDR I’ve been gone because I had to figure out how to adjust the way I run my blog from now on and have come to the conclusion that I will be steering my blog in a more casual direction.
kianamaiart
stormborns
dededos
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
