So, welcome to my humble abode.
This was a bit of a ride.
There are so many things involved in making a website, and it can make you question who you want to be, what you want to do, and how you want to do it. And as websites are for people and essentially for communication, who do you want to communicate with, and what do you want to make them feel?
Doing all this before you have any audience at all is, to say the least, a bit overwhelming.
A crude depiction of what making this website often felt like.
The Difficulty With “Frames”
The moment you are unsure of what your frame is, building a website descends into absolute chaos.
But it's hard not to be challenged by this, because it depends on getting to know yourself, which is very internal and subjective, through your experience with the outside world, which is external and objective. These two sides of the scale need to work together to achieve that sweet spot of balance, which lets you know where you place yourself within the world and within your relationships with people. But before you reach the sweet spot, you tend to swing between the two opposites.
For a long time, I favored the internal, individual side, and I ran away from the external like a fish fleeing the drying sun. I had found something special in my private, dark inner corners. Something pure and real, more real than anything outside. And yet that thing resisted being put into a frame. Practicality and goal-orientedness were its archenemies.
I valued it so much that I rejected all external success and even resigned myself to the possibility that I might have to live my life dependent on others like a perpetual child. That's how much distress I felt whenever I had to lose that part of myself to practical reality.
In any case, a few years ago, those days came to an end as something within me pushed me towards returning to society. Since then, I have learned a lot about how I can have an external life and a practical frame that sustain my inner life rather than destroy it.
A Space to Exist Inside Of
I still have a lot more to learn. But a big part of it is learning to believe that no matter how it may seem, you are good as you are and someone out there wants what you have to offer.
You don’t have to change yourself into what you think (or were taught) is success material.
Practical reality may require some tweaks to how you present yourself and how you work, but that's doable when you aren't suffering from a feeling that you have no right to exist in the first place.
Other than the obvious reasons of being an artist and wishing to run my own business as one, my need for a website was first and foremost a need for a space I could exist inside of. A place to hold me and what I do, everything at once. When I have none, all the work I do feels like it's just floating in the void, without me being able to see where it's going. That's where a frame really helps. It creates a finite space out of the infinite void.
Having to Find Your Own Path
Sometimes, when we have a passion or something we do, the frames come ready-made: "artist", "writer", "philosopher", this and that. You feel called to a path and you start walking it. There are other examples in the outside world you can draw from.
Personally, I wasn't able to find such a path.
Even though art has been my passion since day one, and everyone has always known me as "the artist", I don't like to see myself primarily as an artist, because that feels like a limiting frame for my identity.
Art is not the most important thing in my life. It is more like a tool that serves what is important, but there are other tools I want to carry as part of my identity. The combination of them creates a unique path, and I haven't been able to find an exact example of it out there. So I'm wondering: is there a way to do it just as I am, to create a frame that can sustain me?
I have no idea how to do it yet. I'm merely trying, and I'm not insisting on finding exactly the right frame, ever. I have kinda learned to accept that my outer image and my inner reality will never match 100%. But I'll still try to find my sweet spot, however long it may take.
And Then “You” Come In
The frame and the audience are one.
If I were writing to myself right now, I'd be writing in a different way, saying different things that may or may not have had any meaning for you. But I'm writing to you, whoever you may be.
The interesting part is that I'm merely imagining you.
I have this vague idea of the kind of person I want to be talking to, who exists in this reality. (Well, I could have written to someone from a different reality too, you know.) I want to share in a way you can understand, and I wanna make sure that you get something out of this other than, you know, just me rambling. But I don't really know what the real individuals who read this will get, or what kind of unique experience each of them will have.
Honestly, at this point, I don't even know if there will be anyone at all, but I have to keep on writing as if you are already here. And if you're reading this, well, you are really here!
Making a whole website is like this and so much more. If you make your imaginary audience your perfectionist self, you are f*cked.
Thankfully, what you create doesn't have to be an actual frame of the real you. I'll never be known, I'll never be out there. I'll never even be known by myself.
My site, my work, my words, these are not my image. It helps to think of my site and my business as a dear friend who helps me make things in the world and show them to others. I think this is part of the reason why I prefer to have an alias. Talia Moonheart isn't so much me, but rather a character, a friend, perhaps a being, a spirit. And she is going to evolve and change with time.
Thanks for being here with me on this ride, and I hope you find something in it for you.
