What the art, part 1: Why?
- Art
- Technology
- Neurodivergence
- Mental illness
Today is the day! I’m finally ready to share a project I’ve been working on. A labor of love. It’s been a long time coming—about four months! I’ve shared some details with some close friends and family, but mostly been pretty tight-lipped about it other than a slightly premature post teasing it on social media… 🙃 until now.
When I left my last job at the end of September, I knew I was pretty burned out. But I thought that I wanted to get on the job hunt pretty quickly. So I gave myself one week to decompress, then set myself a deadline to get my résumé updated and start looking after that week. I didn’t quite hit that goal. I was more burned out than I realized, and I needed more time. And I needed to rediscover joy in my work.
I didn’t recognize that at the time, but what I did
recognize is that something in my brain was resistant to
doing the straightforward productive thing. So I did what I’ve
come to learn is a tool I use to cope with ADHD: I tried to
trick myself into wanting to do the productive thing by
wrapping it with a reward. I know what I’ll do!
I said
to myself. I’ll build a website! That’ll be creative
and productive!
Then the project took a turn…
As projects often do, this one grew in scope (in more ways than the art project, I have a bunch of other posts planned to talk about all of the tech goodies I’ve been working up). At first it was going to be just a creative way to market myself. A résumé, maybe that tech blog I’ve been meaning to start for years… Then I started writing my first blog post.
This is not that post. It’s still a draft, still queued up. Because I wanted to talk about something that happened while I was writing it.
I’ve never had a tech blog, or much public tech presence. And while I want this site to mostly focus on tech, I also had begun writing a disclaimer that I may post on other topics, some of which can be challenging. Both because this is my blog after all, and because there are many important, challenging things to talk about that intersect with tech. Basically a site-wide content warning.
But I had mixed feelings about using content warnings, or rather about how they might create an artificial separation between different types of content, and might minimize the non-tech/tech-intersecting content on a tech blog. I wanted a way to make any such warnings clear and prominent. I want to be sure my site is inclusive and doesn’t blindside anyone, whether it’s for tech talk or any other subject I discuss. And I want to keep the project and body of content cohesive and whole.
What evolved from this idea became an art project, an example of which is displayed above this post. You can see that I’ve included labels for:
- Neurodivergence
- Mental illness
I felt since I discussed ADHD and burnout, it’d be a good idea to use the art for its purpose from the start! And a new piece will be included on every post going forward, including those that are “only about tech”.