Experimentation

This year, I've taken the bold step of reintegrating my online presence. I transitioned from posting under a private, pseudonymous Twitter account to a public one with my legal name and professional identity attached. In graduate school, I learned a painful lesson about maintaining personal boundaries at work, and my reaction was to compartmentalize and fragment into carefully developed personae. Now, several years post-academia, I've started to knit the pieces back together; thankfully, my workplace has proven to be safe in this regard. My interests, my identities haven't been used against me. I've gotten a lot of strength from observing my coworkers be their full selves.

It's been therapeutic too: I still can't find a better word to describe the initial onset of depression than “self-shattering”. I thought for a while that part of the problem with recovery was the way I still wanted to regain my former self instead of redefining my current self. Now it seems like it's possible to do a bit of both. This year, I've had more moments than ever where I almost felt like the Me Before. And while we can't go backwards, it's easier to accept the changes that have happened since I can at least construct some lines of retroactive continuity. Identity is narrative, after all.

That's a long-winded way to say: I've started to post on Twitter the sort of content that I used to reserve for my (personal, pseudonymous) blog on Dreamwidth. And of course, Twitter threads are not the right medium. I think I'm now in a space where I'm willing to put such content under my legal name. But I don't want to clutter up my professional blog (rarely updated, now that I'm out of my apprenticeship) with it; I don't want to go that far with reintegration. Hence, this experiment.

I've been considering taking this step for a couple of months now, but what really spurred me on was realizing that I was putting footnotes in my Twitter thread and that apparently I did have enough words in me for something longer than a couple of related quips. If I manage to get into a regular rhythm of posting, I'll crosspost under lock to Dreamwidth and maybe reconnect a bit with the people who used to read me there.

The domain name itself is a pun: 李 means plum tree and 하나 means one. I really am putting my name on it.