“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”

In deciding to redesign my website recently, I went to Archive.org and looked back at some of my previous designs over the years to get some inspiration for creating something new. While I reminisced and looked back fondly on some of the minimalistic designs I had created, what the process quickly shifted to was what I had written and so succinctly at times.

What jumped out at me was how 2011 and 2012 seemed to be very poignant, transformational years. In effect, even though I wasn’t able to fully articulate myself and my work as a whole, what I articulated was profound. This was both the time where the deeper meaning of my Be Real Creative mantra was birthed but also the first time where I courageously and specifically stated that I was beginning to perceive “life as a game”within my post entitled The Playful Vision.

But the more I dove through these archives, the more I realized I was expressing profound things even much earlier. Like even as early as 2002, I was expressing really radical thoughts about perceiving a transformational world rather than our current transactional one in my post entitled Give What You Think It Is Worth To You. Considering I was using the Radio Userland software at the time (which had features that most web platforms still haven’t replicated today), I’m assuming this was after I had read The Cluetrain Manifesto and it had influenced me so deeply.

All said and done though, what affected me the most upon reflecting upon this all was a realization of how much more I wished I could have seen and read but couldn’t because of my reoccurring pattern of going offline in frustration at being unable to fully express myself…before eventually coming back online again. Yet what’s so ironic is that in my frustration of not being able to express myself so fully, I was often expressing myself in ways far beyond what I had been doing so before.

What I’m getting at here is often it seemed like I was so focused on where I wanted to be in the future, that I was often completely missing how much I had radically changed from my past to the present at that time.