Sitting Down Here
While listening to the radio in the kitchen last night, “Sitting Down Here” by Lene Marlin began playing, and I've been humming it ever since. I remember the album being released – in the autumn of 1999. I'm fairly sure I ripped the album to MP3 files, and played it via a wonderful piece of software called WinAmp.
Anyway.
While making a coffee earlier, I began humming it again – and thinking about this blog – and something occurred to me. I'm sitting down here, on my own, away from most of the “social internet”. My writing has lived at Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr over the last few years – for a long time I played the game – unwittingly chasing follows, likes, and comments – just like everybody else. Until I didn't any more, and I'm not really sure why.
I suppose in some ways I'm just happy to sit here now, and post my words. Yes, it's nice if a few people read them from time to time, but the words are not here for others – they are here because I want them to be. I'm not saying that the big social platforms are bad – just that I feel no need to use them any more.
Maybe it's connected to age. When you're younger there's often a desire to fit in – or at least there was for me. As I've gotten older I've cared less about what other people think of me. You might call it confidence I suppose. I have nothing to prove to anybody any more – I am quite happy being me.
It's a funny thing though – accepting yourself, or others. I would be the first to hold my hands up and admit to doing stupid things in the past – to doing things I'm not proud of – but I also think too many people get hung up on “being a saint”, and judging others against unrealistic expectations. We're all human. As much as we might not want to be at times, we are all square pegs – some of us are just better at pretending to be round pegs for the majority of the time.
I'm not sure this post is really going anywhere in particular. It's going somewhere. Perhaps that's enough. One footstep at a time.