Today’s ThinkKit is called “Aloha” and encourages bloggers to talk about something they’ve said goodbye, or hello, to during the year. Well, I intend to do both.
This year I said hello to my new Twitter account (@EmmaLindhagen for those of you who don’t know) and, eventually, goodbye to my old one. This might not seem like a big deal, but it sort of was to me. It was part of a sort of personal renaissance which involved finally taking myself seriously as a writer. For years, I’ve been thinking about writing as a hobby, something I do on the side for fun that I might some day take more seriously. I realized a while back that while that’s how I thought about it logically (and, consequently, treated it in terms of allocation of time and resources), emotionally I didn’t view it as a hobby but as a craft, as a future profession, a passion. Sort of a calling, though it’s not a word I use a lot. I decided at some point last year that I needed to start treating it accordingly, and so I bought this domain, made a pledge to write every single day and made a Twitter account to go with my real name so that I didn’t have to tweet about my projects from an account with a screen name.
Initially I had planned to use both my new account and my old, screen name wearing, account. I am in general a pretty big fan of compartmentalizing social media, especially high-intensity media like Twitter and I do (still to this day) have two other Twitter accounts for some more niched hobbies that I think my regular followers wouldn’t want to see a lot of updates about. However, after only a few weeks I realized that I was having trouble separating the two and deciding what to tweet from which account. As it turned out Emma, the Sims 2 player, could quite easily be kept on a separate account from Emma, the person, but Emma, the writer, could not. And this is where it becomes a big deal: I realized that being a writer was simply too big a part of who I was to be kept as a side account, or a side project, or a hobby. That was both a scary and pleasing realization. I ended up closing down my old account. I still have two “hobby” accounts, but just one “personal” account for Emma, the writer and the person.
ThinkKit is a blog project, with daily prompts in December. Friends who are also doing this are Zee Southcombe and Amanda Staley.