Study Blogging

Property of Stormberry

 On the 19th of this month, while celebrating the Quinquatria with the girls of the informal coven, one of them asked me to take a picture of her bubble tea. She's a booktuber/bookstagrammer, and she took the chance to vlog the process, and as she pointed her camera at me, she called me a "studygrammer". My reaction was "What?????". 

Am I a studygrammer?

As most people in the planet, I have a wide range of interests, but maybe, the most prominent of my interests are books, comfort and the aesthetics related to writing, reading and researching. As such - and since I spend a large chunk of my life studying - I search and share a lot of pictures labeled as #studygram, mostly because these include handwriting, notebooks, books and all sorts of stationery. But am I a studygrammer? I would have thought I'm not, and rather I would say, that if anything, I'm more a foodstagrammer, if I'm any kind of -stagrammer. 

Property of Stormberry

The curious thing about lables is that they often not match. One thing is how you see yourself and another is how other people see you. And it's not even a matter of your view of yourself against the collective view of the rest of the world. Take this snapshot of my IG feed: what do you see there? Maybe you see the coffee, or your eyes go to the cocktail, or to the journals, or you interpret the journals as books and notebooks and think these are study stuff. Or you see the witch-haul. Like interpreting a Tarot spread, different people with see different things and if asked to lable it something, there will be different lables including the all-catching "lifestyle".

I see my feed and I think that this is but a fraction of who I am and what I do, and even from this I can interpret something that might be entirely different than what others see.

So, who is right?

Property of Stormberry

Nobody and everybody. Factually, physically speaking, there is only one me, but at the same time there are millions and millions of me, and I'm not talking of the multiverse, but the millions of me that live in the minds of the people who know me (that includes you, dear reader), and all those me-s are real, even if they are different from al the other me-s and the me that I know. There is no "right" about that, there is just "there is". So, my "me", the one I know and live with, is not a studygrammer, but someone who enjoys studygram and studyblr, but the me in my friend's head is indeed a studygrammer. And we both can coexist, even if in different planes.

The point of this is, if you are you in your head, and someone else sees the facts of you, but in their head you exist with a different form, should you  try and be like the you in that person's head, or should you try to reshape the you in that person's head to match the you you see? Unifying the image of you in the minds of everybody must be a very exhausting exercise and quite futile, as it is impossible they would mach. Besides, what's the real benefit of having everybody seeing you in the exact same way? Why would that be better than how things are with different versions of you running around the world?

Think about that, and when you do, when the answer starts to clear in your head, take a moment to also think why the opinion of others could hold any power over you.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe you could reclaim your freedom, be you, an independent, strong and wonderful you, and let all the other you-s live out there, freely.

What is really adding to your life?

Property of Stormberry

It is a common place to value and desire the truth above all, and despise lies, but inspite of that, we are surrounded by lies. The fact is, everybody lies. When someone says that they never lie, they are right then lying. You may not outright lie (all the time), but you may be lying by omission, which is when you leave out a piece of the truth and you let others get to wrong conclusions. That's also a form of lying.

It's also lying when you affirm something you are not 100% sure of, and you don't clarify that you are not 100% sure it is so, or you say it in a way - to save yourself in case it turns out false - that still gives the idea that this thing you say it's true. So, as you can see, we all lie, and we are all told lies, all the time. However, in the face of all these lies swirling around us, we take different attitudes. Some decide to "ration" their lies and tell them only when they feel it's needed - needed to protect, for instance, someone else or themselves -, and other may choose to use lies to joke, entertain or make things more interesting. Yet others may choose to benefit themselves or someone/something, often disregarding the damage they may be causing to the people who believe they are being truthful.

It also happens that we tell lies to others, but also to ourselves. We tell lies to ourselves about ourselves, about our situation, our environment, and also about others. Relationships are a fertile ground where we tell ourselves a lot of lies. We justify the behavior of someone towards us because we don't want to face what's really happening, we don't want to break illusions we've built (positive or negative) and we wish to remain in the safe world we have created, even if it's all built up upon the lies we ourselves have concocted.

I believe I have lied for a lont time to myself about someone. I may have been trying to believe that there was a connection, and though there might be a connection, it may not be of the type, the depth and the nature I have imagined it to be. It doesn't matter how perceptive you otherwise are, these lies to yourself are hard to pinpoint because you purposefully don’t want to see them. I'm still in the fence about this situation, but as I was talking to a friend of mine about it, she told me: "this person is so toxic. Really, what are they adding to your life?", and that got me thinking.

What are they adding to your life?

I would have jumped immediatelly to explain how we have many shared experiences, and how this person is the one person I currently know and understand my background for many of my ways of seeing the world. I would have said that this person shares so many of my building experiences and knowledge, that they are the best qualified in my life to get how and why I see things. But before I could answer my friend's text, I stopped to think, and I questioned myself "Do they?".

And here is the tricky thing, because it doesn't matter that we are contempporaneous, that we grew up in the same neighbourhood, that our parents belonged to the same party and they worked for the same sector/company, or that they and I studied the same career in the same university at the same time. We are not equall, and shared memories do not mean that understanding is automatic. I had to go through old journals, check my records (because my memory is very bad), and a patterns seems to emerge: I am the one trying to make our connection and our conversartions deep, while they trade in gossip and unfounded conspiratorial misinformation. We may have walked down the same path, side by side, but we are not in the same page.

It's a lie I've told myself and I keep telling myself, because I do want this connection to my past, I don't want to lose it, but I must prepare myself to face the music: this person is a stranger to me and has nothing to add to my life. And it doesn't matter the value of what I can give them,  they are not prepared to see it for what it is. What I could give them would be wasted on them.