on identity

who are you doing all this for?

Every winter break, the last two weeks of the year where nothing is going on, I remake my portfolio. In the past, it was because I was on the eternal treadmill of becoming a UX designer. But now, recognizing the fragility of that identity as a basis for my entire self¹ and emboldened by the liminality of a new year, I sought to make a website as a reinvention of myself.

It’s strange to call portfolios and websites as portraits of ourselves, but we are already painters in our digital presence. In an interview I read recently in Syntax Mag, Maya Man mentions:

Social media is a digital memory of who we were at certain points of time and what we found important enough to share². To post is to be perceived and to be perceived is to be known which is in turn, a form of becoming.

quote from bliss montage

However this idea of perception becomes a self-imposed prison. I watched myself through the lens of how I thought others would see me, which turned into subtle creeping fears that if I put myself out there earnestly, it would be misinterpreted in some antagonistic way. If I wrote too negatively, then perhaps someone would think I had massive self-esteem issues, if I wrote too cautiously, it would be disappointing how I caved to this fake panopticon when reality no one cared that deeply, and if I wrote at all, who was I to think my words were good enough to write publicly³? All pointed to things that happened in my past that always led me to expect the worst and so I didn’t really post at all, for reasons that were all in my own head.

I was recently talking to a friend about how we both wanted to do more creative work in the new year, and they noted that “to be an artist you need to have a perspective”. If all my actions were influenced by ghosts of how I thought others would see me, then whose perspective was I even creating for? Even if, realizing that, I created for myself, who was that person exactly? In Joan Didion’s essay (iykyk) that I had found on tumblr years before, she writes

…there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Every year, every newsletter, there is some common string of myself that ties it together, some reoccurring theme, and perhaps that singular thread is the hyperawareness I have of my own self or lack thereof. But to say that I was only painting a shadow on the wall isn’t true. I created this newsletter as a form of actualization for myself. I wanted to confidently shout into the void that I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I wanted my friends to know what I was thinking and I wanted to know what they were thinking too.

that’s what speaking is, quote from babel

And so, at the end of the year, I looked at myself, the parts that were only visible in the last hours of sunny days, the parts I had put online, the parts hidden in conversations with friends, the parts stored in phone screenshots and are.na collections, the parts that weren’t there that I wanted to be and I made a website for it. But even in the layers of myself distributed by my half-assed javascript attempt, it isn’t entirely who I am. However, it isn’t the output that is a form of becoming, rather the making of it in the first place.

this is lowkey still cookin should be done in a couple days…

I told my friend I was making this website and she said it’s scary to put your values out there because it could be used to hurt you⁴. I think that is true, that’s why we abstract out our thoughts, that’s why I write so loftily, that’s why what we put out there isn’t ever literal. But with that risk, comes the risk of spring.

I tried to read the little prince and don’t remember much except this line

With a better sense of self, I’ll gently carve the mold for my creative practice in the new year and continue to try creating for myself. I hope everyone reading this has a good winding of the year and a good coming year!

by yumi sakugawa

notes:

1. coming to the realization that every year I both gain and lose clarity and it becomes increasingly harder to think in binaries - the world is complicated!

2. big thank you to everyone I met this year and the kindness I received in times of uncertainty, a lot of things are scary but I’d choose to remember gratitude than fear

3. it is an incredibly warm winter in PA an ever pressing reminder that the world is warming so try to reduce reuse and recycle in the coming year⁵

4. consider donating the palestine children’s relief fund and calling your representatives for ceasefire

1. it’s crazy how much people think your job and your age is enough to constitute for who you are (for ex. in single’s inferno that info is the biggest reveal). I met someone at a gathering that lamented this notion, and it led me to question how I could represent myself beyond those two facts, it’s difficult for most people’s jobs to be what they truly care about and love

2. like most blanket statements maybe this isn’t true but it is at least for me and one other person

3. insert trope of chronically online person with a newsletter / blog

4. not that I’m wellknown enough to get canceled but internet cancel culture is scary

5. it is true that most fossil fuels are at the hands of big corporations, but I haven’t fallen down the cynicism that what we do on our day to day doesn’t matter