[I wrote this post quite a while back, but the trigger to post is Cyn’s recent post of a similar nature]
Those of you who read my other blog – brants, know the site by now. When I announced it on twitter at that point of time, Twilight Fairy‘s immediate response was “mubarakein! so finally you use ur real name in the virtual world 😛 :)” I told her, that the real name already existed in the virtual world – Facebook, LinkedIn, but I had an inkling of what she meant, because I felt a twinge when I took ‘brants’ out of the manuscrypts domain. Though I did not dwell on it, it was a defining moment for me in its own way. I did dwell on whether I should write this post, and you now know the result.
I checked the names on my blogroll and was reassured to find a few handles that are just that – handles, not names. Maybe we’re from a different generation of bloggers. Ones who blogged for reasons that were utterly different from the reasons now. That’s generalising, yes, but there was something then about virtuality that offered a haven from reality. Some have moved on, some have clung on, and some have just drifted on, like me.
As a handle, ‘manuscrypts’ has been in existence for more than half a dozen years now. Long before the blog, there were chatrooms. Then came the blog, and while it was a personal one, over a period of time, the persona slowly overshadowed the personality, my picture does not exist on the blogs, the M symbol does. Actually, I think its a bit more complicated. A part of me is vastly different from my overt personality. The blog became an ideal location for this rarely revealed (only when I’m very comfortable with people) personality to manifest itself. So its more than just a handle. It was a world in itself.
This was the only place the persona had, and I realise that I’ve been trying to shield ‘manuscrypts’, but I got carried away. Let me explain. Its to do with what Ideasmith calls the personality of a blog. Thanks to the shielding, the blog has come to dictate what kind of posts appear here – the kind of humour, the kind of seriousness, its all getting stereotyped? Conformity within non conformity. But manuscrypts wasn’t supposed to be constrained. Where once I wrote stuff even if it sounded fun only to myself, these days, I think before I post. I wonder if the jokes sound stale, I wonder if the puns are too subtle. I wonder if I’m being funny enough. I obsess. I’m guarded. I measure. I even wonder if i play to the gallery, yes, both of you. 🙂 And I’m not sure I like that.
Meanwhile, six years is a long time, the world and the real personality have been at work too. In the real world, we now build personal brands online. 🙂 We don’t have to, but it helps. That partly explains the reason that I shifted the ‘work’ content to a different domain altogether. It was a significant step – a giving in to reality. The real and the virtual moving towards each other. And while I could have kept the two domains thoroughly apart, without the person connecting them, I didn’t see a point. Both are facets of my personality.
And while that was happening, a life has also been evolving. New interests, old interests rekindled, new people, new experiences, new avenues to be explored, all of it to be done in reality. Many times, a post has come up here only thanks to self discipline. For something like blogging, i don’t know if that’s a good thing. There is a power struggle between my own evolution and the expectations I have set for myself on this blog. I think that is pretty dumb and pompous for a little blog. There, i make it all easy for you – you just have to agree. 🙂
So I saw it coming, actually even before I wrote this. But sometimes, something becomes so much of a focal point, that you stop thinking about it objectively. For me, it was the blog/s. But these days, I wonder if you have as much fun here as you used to earlier. And I have to confess, it does make me feel inadequate, helpless, and strangely, old. Not old enough to quit blogging, but old enough to wonder whether churning out 5 posts a week (both domains included) was the best way, for everyone concerned. And that’s not including the microblogging. (self hosted, so you can comment)
So erm, that was what all this was about. To tell you in the only rambling fashion I know, that I am going to reduce the frequency here, maybe once a week, so that I free up a little more time for myself, to do things that I don’t want to postpone and regret later, to figure out things for myself, to let myself roam a bit, to see if i can reach a state which the persona and the person will be happy about, all without having to worry if the blog will be updated.
And for those kind people have been reading manuscrypts from the time he was only a little handle, he still lives, at least for now, and thinks there’s no page like home. 🙂
until next time, handling it 🙂
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