This little corner of the internet.

"It's incredibly comforting to know that as long as you don't create anything in your life, then nobody can attack the thing you created." - David Wong, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person

This little corner of the internet is mine. I have staked it out with my own hands.

If the internet were a physical space, a garden, this would be a 1m x 1m allotment I had somehow acquired for free by merely asking for it. I would be tending it every few days, talking to the grass, planting rainbow flags in the corners, telling anyone who came to look for me that this is mine. Amazingly, some people would come to look at my little space in the allotment, and I'd smile and tell them that this is mine. I created this. It's not much, but I can safely say it belongs to me.

We scoff at people with ideas, don't we? We roll our eyes, and say "sure, like THAT will happen". We're so quick to destroy other people with drive and ambition, and I feel like it's because, on the inside, we all think we're lacking that.

I have no drive. I have been trying to write a politics essay for seven hours. I was literally given the paragraph headings, and yet I haven't managed to write into the gaps. I have no drive to do that because it's important. I'll have to hand it in, and get a mark for it, and the chances are it won't be as good a mark as I want. And instead of thinking about how I should have worked harder to get that grade, I'll just sigh and tell myself that's what I get for doing anything. I have to deal with the gulf between what I hoped for and what really happened, and that's disappointing? And the easiest way to not have that gulf is to, uh, not do anything.

If you don't do anything, it can't get ruined.

This is my corner of the internet. This is basically my diary, except that it's in a public place so I can't yell at my brother for violating my privacy if he reads it (though I never kept a diary as a child, so I never had to deal with him doing that). Sure, there are some people I would rather wouldn't read this, but I can't stop them. And they can't stop me from writing.

The very act of creating anything is so important. It's a contribution to society. It's why I think girls are kind of indoctrinated into the world of baking from a young age: you are taught that by contributing, and giving things to other people, you will receive love. And while the baking thing does have a gender skew and sexism and stereotypes of femininity and a woman's supposedly natural role all rolled into it, the priniciple is the same: we are only worth as much as we can give to others. (For reference, I didn't bake much as a child as my mother hates it, but over the past two years I've become FUCKING AMAZING at it.)

I am giving you my words. I am giving you my thoughts. I'm aware that they aren't very good, but I am trying. I am producing something new. This blog post has been written by thousands of other people with exactly the same sentiments, but this is new. Because this is my take on it. I'm very lucky that I've never had any negative comments on here; I'm all too aware of the backlash you can suffer simply by being someone (especially - gasp - a WOMAN!) on the internet, with opinions. In other places I've been called an "angry lesbian", a walking cliche, a privileged hipster trust fund kid. I've been called dirty and unhygenic and lazy for admitting I don't shave particularly regularly. They are accusations levelled at me for what I am, or perceived to be. Not because of what I do.

But at least I try. At least I produced something for you to use to insult me. If I hadn't have tried, I wouldn't be in this position.

So come on, come at me bro. Come to my allotment. Kick my flowers. Pick my fruit off all the sapling trees and trample it into the ground. Snap my twigs. You can't stop the fact I created these things in the first place.

This little corner of the internet is mine, and I've invited you to come have a look around. Come in, have a look around; and if you don't like it, get your own garden. Grow your own words there. I hear it's free. All it costs is a little time.

Egocentricity and attention-seeking.

One of the things that routinely bugs me is when egocentricity and attention-seeking are seen as negative traits - or, more specifically, huge gaping flaws that somehow poke holes in the otherwise perfect moral fabric you have woven.

Here's the thing: we are all egocentric. We have to be. It's part of being alive, and having a single consciousness which is so acutely ours, not someone else's. We are not a hive mind, or a socialist collective - as awesome as that might be. We all live our lives in the first person present: I am writing now, you are reading now, you are experiencing these words now now now. Nobody else is inside your brain, reading this with you. We are all the heroes of our own stories, even though we're the secondary recurring characters in everyone else's. You, by definition, cannot actually know what it is like to be me, or someone else, or really anyone except you, because then you wouldn't be you. You are the centre of your own universe, and the same is true of everyone else. We are each other's little mental galactic neighbours.

So, being self-absorbed might not be the best situation to be in, but it's our standard state. And it's not necessarily a bad one. Think of all the awesome shit which wouldn't have got done unless brilliant people were so concerned with unpacking the jumbled contents of their own heads. Would we have The Great Gatsby if F. Scott Fitzgerald spent all his spare time tending his neighbour's allotment? Would we have Othello if Shakespeare had no had a compulsion to tell stories by committing words to paper? Would we have had the internet? Sure, it was invented with community and sharing in mind - which benefits the people who use it. Almost everything is created for our own benefit, and benevolent creations will still give the creator a nice little sense of moral superiority. Would we do anything if it didn't directly or indirectly help us? I'm not sure we would.

The extreme of egocentricity is, of course, narcissism, but that's a registered psychiatric disorder. Delusions of grandeur and all. You can see yourself as a main character in a narrative without assuming you have all the traditionally positive traits associated with it. It's just how things work.

It's the more mundane egocentricity we dislike, the attention seeking. We all do it. I'm doing it right now, writing this blog. It's just another way for me to scream NOTICE ME! CARE ABOUT ME! VALIDATE ME! into the roaring abyss that is the 'Net. It's why people dislike Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham so much, I think: they're like a mirror of us. When we look at celebrities, we want to see chrome-smooth perfection, all smiles and graciousness and perfectly crafted one-liners fed to them via an earpiece. Instead, with them, we see the ugly side of ourselves we'd rather avoid: the callous need to be noticed, to be complimented, to be loved back.

Most of us would rather pretend that knawing hole inside us doesn't exist. It's the part of us that makes us pine over people we can never have, do stupid outlandish gestures just for the reaction, the part of us we want to keep in the dark in our dingy headspaces. Swift and Dunham shine a light at it, those irritating OOH OOH ME ME! noises we try to keep quiet. And when we see something we don't like, a far easier option to confronting it is to shun it.

I crave attention. There, I said it. I fish for compliments. I post pictures of my hair on Facebook and feel a little warm and fuzzy when people press the like button. I've come to expect texts from certain people and I'm upset when they don't reply. I people to know who I am, and what I do, and have an opinion of me, even if it is that I'm needy and cloying. Because I know that they took the time to think about me, and devise an opinion, and so I took up their thoughts, if just for a little while.

You probably shouldn't have read this. You're just feeding my ego. But thanks. I appreciate it. Now go get on with your own story. This is nothing more than a paragraph in your day, even if it's a chapter in mine.