In recent years I’ve experienced a strange discomfort with my online persona: my Twitter account, old versions of my website, etc. It occurs when I look at the summation of things I’ve posted and the kind of image they create, and I feel that that version of me online has diverged from who I am now, standing on its own almost as a separate entity. The discomfort stems not from disliking what I see necessarily, but rather that it feels strange to continue using that online profile when it has all this history behind it that I don’t consider representative of me. It discourages me from doing/posting whatever I want because I feel somehow anchored to the existing image and don’t want to disrupt what is already there, or what people have come to expect of it.
One result of this is that every so often I’ll start building some new identity on some different platform, creating a new image which is appropriate at least for the time being. But as time wears on, each of these in turn become somewhat outdated and starts to suffer the same fate.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing, per se. It suggests that I am growing and changing as a person. Moving from one online identity to another is no crime. It’s more that I find myself unsure what to do with old identities, whether to let them stand, evolve them into something new, or perhaps delete them altogether. It just nags at me like an old trinket on the shelf that I don’t know whether to throw out or relocate. Maybe some kind of spring cleaning would do the trick; I would just need to decide what to do with everything.
For now, this wiki does a good job representing my ‘here and now’, and I wonder for how long that will be the case.