Anyone who knows me knows that I have a wide-sweeping array of varied interests. I get myself involved with and passionately interested in a lot of different things. Perhaps you know me through the Blender community, since I’ve been involved there for over two decades now. Or maybe the net is a bit wider and you’re more familiar with the stuff I’ve done with open source creative tools. You might know me through the indie writing and publishing scene. Or perhaps it’s the wooden rings or punny t-shirt designs that I’ve made and sold. You may even know me by way of the full time traveling community.
But there’s a good chance that you only know about or care about one or two of those things. *
This behavior isn’t new to me. I’ve been doing this nearly all my life. In my teens, I had school friends and Scouting friends. When I hit college, I had people who knew me from engineering school, but a different set of people knew me in art school, and still another group only knew me through the kung fu studio I was training at. Hell, I was even given a different name in each of these different groups.
To be clear, I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not. The me that these people knew—that you still know—is the same me that’s writing this blog post. The only difference is the silo of interest. When I’m in that silo, that’s where all of my focus is. None of the other stuff I do matters at that time.
On some level, I wish I could say that it was deliberate or that I had any real intentionality behind this kind of “life silo-ing” at the time. However, for me it all happened quite organically. Maybe it does for other people, too. But once a pattern is set, it’s very easy for subsequent actions to deliberately reinforce that pattern. Each of my writing pen names has their own website, social media presence, and email list. The same goes for my other projects. Blender For Dummies, my faded podcast, the rings, the shirts, the family travel.
There’s certainly value in being able to intensely focus on one specific interest at a time. However, the trade-off is that there’s a fairly strict partitioning of your life in alignment with each particular interest. And, practically speaking, it’s just a lot. Each new interest gets its own space, its own personality. Keeping up with all of them is a job unto itself… and I already have more than one of those.
I think it’s time for me to break down some of those walls I’ve built in my head. It’s time for worlds to collide.
But it’s going to be slow. I think that there’s still value in each project having its own dedicated focus and even its own voice. They’re all me. Just different facets of me. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I allowed them to bleed into each other a bit.
I mean, I already do it here on this website. It’s not like I’m keeping any of these pursuits as a secret. But maybe the social accounts for these projects start to “collaborate” with each other more… and with me. It stands to reason that if you like one of the things I do, then maybe you’ll like one of the other things, too. And if you don’t, that’s fine. Those individual communication channels aren’t going away any time soon. Maybe there’s a future where that happens, but that would mean that people are more interested in me than any of the things I do. That perspective doesn’t really align with my current sense of self. If I’m going to change that, then I need to do it slowly.
So, I’d like to present myself as a more complete person. I’m not just any of the individual things that I do. They’re all me. And I’m probably past due on telling that story.
* It’s also possible that you don’t know or care about any of those things and you happened to simply stumble upon this blog post. Inadvertent SEO win?