Take Two
The Why
I created this blog last year to be a simple diary of my month back in Italy. I did it for 10 days, then realized I had no motivation to keep updating it, the same way I have no interest in sharing my daily life on any social media. And that’s okay. It wasn’t a failure, for me, since I wanted to learn the stack I’m currently using (JAMstack with Gatsby, Netlify, Netlify CMS and so on) and eventually build my personal page. That happened and I’m happy I did things that way.
What I stupidly couldn’t foresee, was that after that month things would get progressively worse (in the world and in my life) and I would revert to my classic use of a blog. A “thought dumpster” I would use when I’m down, writing whatever I was thinking regardless of who might be reading. I wrote relatively a lot in the last few months, as a way to analyze my feelings and, ideally, get out of the pit I felt confined to. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t. That wasn’t the reason why I started the blog and it really wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but I decided to stop doing it after pushing out most of the poisonous feelings swimming in the back of my head, hoping to get rid of them by just giving them form, black on white. I learned years ago that any big, scary thought becomes small when put on paper, and loses its power. And it’s good to have it there, to read it weeks or months later and see how much progress you’ve made. Normal administration when dealing with mental bureaucracy.
The What
A few weeks ago the head of HR contacted me for a quick meeting. I had no idea what it was for, until I realized one of the co-founders of the company was in the invitation. I almost jumped in without realizing what it was about, thinking it had to do with my leaving a few weeks later. What I discovered was, unfortunately, much different. Apparently one of the companies I was interviewing with or I had applied to, had requested a informal check because of something they had found on my blog.
I won’t go into too much detail here, but that was devastating for me. It took me weeks to get over it. The thing that probably bothered me the most is how two small paragraphs, out of thousands, were taken out of context to judge me as a person. The second most-bothering thing was how the head of HR thought it was appropriate to embarrass me showing something personal to other people in the company and read them in front of a third person, the number 2 at the company.
I don’t want people to read this and think what kind of monstrous things were written there, but taking them out of context they sound much worse than they are. I will paraphrase what these two posts were about and mean, since they’re not public anymore.
The first one was an obvious joke about me wanting to be sexually promiscuous this coming summer. The tone of the post made it obvious I wasn’t serious, but apparently that was “alarming” for some people. After all sex is bad and makes Jesus sad.
In the second one, by far the one that bothered and embarrassed me the most, I was explaining how I feared that I might have unrealistic standards. Some sentences could sound slightly bitter and misogynist if taken out of context, since it expressed a generic opinion on women my age, but it wasn’t hateful in any way. It was an expression of my preferences. In the end I was trying to exorcise my fear of basically not deserving the kind of person I am looking for. Maybe I should have done a better job at explaining it, on my personal blog, completely unrelated to work, with dozens of other posts that were absolutely fine. I’m being sarcastic here.
The Then
Before even hearing what I was being accused of, I put it down. They didn’t ask me to, but I played defensively. I wasn’t in the state of mind of fighting and I wanted to avoid troubles in the few weeks I had left. They had only asked me to “do something about it because when you search for your name, the name of the company comes up and that can be a problem for you”. And that happens because the company put my name on their website. Absolutely my fault, yes.
I did my best to steelman their position, in part I understand the company, but I can’t help but feel they could have managed it better. I regret bending so easily and even feeling bad about it. As much as I wanted to fight instead of worsen my state of mind, I had to play it smart and avoid any kind of trouble, with both my current and any future employer. Because this is the world we live in. You’re not entitled to your feelings and thoughts, if they’re not considered pure. Unfortunately, my freedom of thought and expression are not negotiable.
After turning the blog off and removing it from Google, I decided to put it back up but make it private. I wired up authentication, which was relatively complex but interesting, and put it back online, with a pretty angry page for unauthenticated users.
After that, I decided to make some posts public and some posts private, which makes more sense. After all I want to have a public diary that can be used for work, explaining what I am doing, how I’m building it, what technologies I’m using and so on. I don’t want to do it professionally, but I’d like to build an online presence, especially now that I’m on the verge of creating my own homepage and starting a new job, doing something quite different from everything I’ve done so far. It’d be nice to document the whole process (more on that later).
The Now
I’m not bothered as much as I was, I can talk and even joke about it. After all, it’s better to have people laugh with you at the stain on your shirt instead of cringing at you trying to hide the aforementioned stain. After all, stains are something you can wash away. At worst, you can always get rid of that old shirt and buy a new one. And I’m in the midst of renewing my wardrobe.
I will probably write an extended private post about the current situation, where I will go into much more detail about the persons involved, how I felt and why I think I wasn’t treated fairly, but again, this is not what I want the public blog to be. I am thinking of making public some of the other posts that are currently private, but I’ll probably do it after the homepage/portfolio is complete.
An Update
I’ve been able to work on the portfolio for a few weeks and it’s coming along well. I’m not sure when it’ll be ready, but shouldn’t be too long for now. I have completed the skeleton and a couple sections. I might need two or three more things to consider it done, and I already have an idea how they’ll look like and work. Fingers crossed, should be ready by July, if I’m not too busy between the new job, the move and managing my new LTD company (I’m actually paying an accountant, so I won’t be managing anything lol)
I will try to write a few posts about it, since I’ve dealt with a few challenges already, and they might be useful. That’s all for now. Can’t wait for the weather to get better so I can finally be sexually promiscuous! (IT’S A JOKE)