The Burden of Perfection

2020-07-02

When I began developing websites, it was a very freeing exercise. The editor was a blank canvas, and its artifact was visible by everyone anywhere anytime.

I built my first projects not because I was trying to get a career in software or anything like that. It was just curiosity mixed with some vanity.

What exactly did I want everyone to see? Oh my. Those early artifacts are unsurprisingly cringe. Very sentimental, very self-involved ramblings of a 19-year-old mostly-introvert-dabbling-in-extroversion.

LOOK AT ME WAIT DONT LOOK AT ME NEVER MIND

Give a mouse a megaphone and they become frightened of their own squeaks.

If you are a human, you have habits, and some of them are bad habits. If you are like me, one of your bad habits is needing a sense of control, and therefore needing your Things to be perfect in order to exist, obviously.

So despite your vision of your online parade, none of your editor’s artifacts get into your online parade unless they are perfect artifacts. Obviously.

Fast-forward two decades with no lasting presence. This has mostly been fine?

Mostly. And yet, I still value presence online of others. The presence of others has helped me. I’ve been able to do what I do because of people putting things online. I owe my livelihood to it. The web.

This is starting to hit me. I’ve stayed mostly quiet, admittedly out of fear. Fear still lurks a bit.

But what if I stopped being quiet for a while? What could it look like? Maybe there’s something to offer? Might I rekindle some of the energy that pushed me into this world in the first place? There was something that brought me here. What did it mean to me, and where did it go?

Twenty years later I might find it. If you’re here to see what I find, welcome.