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.