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Sonderous : the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own
Denouement: the final resolution of the intricacies of a plot
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Loving the Language of Literacy
I've made an entire post pertaining to how I came up with the name and while there are some days when I get tongue tied with the name of my own YouTube channel, I am never going to regret it. However, the topic I want to address today is branding and what niche you belong to. The popular British blogger Ashley Evans from Nose Graze who I discovered via the bookish community touches up on this subject quite a lot and has written a ton of concise, thought provoking posts pertaining to this very subject.
There is absolutely no denying that I have been inconsistent with blogging in 2015. To be honest, when I wrote The Evolution of Labels, I knew it was the end of an era. I knew I wouldn't have the time to dedicate myself to blogging and my heart simply wasn't in the task anymore. There are countless reasons I prefer the platform of YouTube over blogging, analytics are faster, easier to comprehend, recognition is a tad easier to come by, and the entire creative process is so much more rewarding for me.
Regardless, that doesn't mean I have stopped writing altogether. I've mentioned this in many a YouTube video, but I'm taking the creative writing course at my high school, I'm extremely involved in my school's literary magazine, I go to weekly writing class at my local YMCA, and I recently won NaNoWriMo for the 2nd year in a row. Needless to say, I keep busy. In fact, I'm writing more than ever. In the past year alone, I have worked my way through two spiral bound notebooks filled with poetry, prose, and overall teenage angst, and I'm on a third.
The original reason I began blogging was because I had opinions and I wanted them to be heard. Although most of my opinions pertain to books. There have been many occurrences where in social situations, acquaintances, peers, and friends will ask what my Instagram is and I tell them - with the PREFACE that the majority of pictures I post are of books. This has been an ongoing battle for me in the past year on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and this blog. If it weren't for the bookish community, there's no way I'd ever have social media. I just don't see the need for it, I'm not going to post an endless slew of selfies, that just isn't me. Simultaneously, once people I know from "real life" discover my various platforms of self expression, I instantaneously get self conscious and have been afraid to press the POST button because it's nerdy, it's weird, or any of the other endless excuses I have. However, what I'm coming to realize is, they can unfollow me in a heartbeat and never have to see another bookish post again if they want. This is who I am, these are my interests, and the reason I created social media was to interact with those with similar interests, to get the stimulation and conversation I was lacking with these people I knew in real life... no offense to those who may be reading.
However, two years is a long time. The first time I ever posted on this blog was December 7, 2013 which to be perfectly honest, feels like an entire lifetime ago. I was a completely different person and while the interest in books may have remained the same, my priorities, my focus, my passions, as well as the actual genres and types of books themselves are vastly different. I'm suffering from a little disease we all like to call growing up. I'm going to change as I experience new things and therefore what I want for myself and feel the need to share will be different.
With all of that said, I have been wanting to discuss a wider array of topics and tackle different issues that stray away from the literature I still do love very much. I'm a teenager, the only constant variable pertaining to my identity is the fact that it won't be the same if you ask me two hours later. I have considered and even been asked - Why don't you create a second YouTube channel? Why don't you create another blog? I have my reasons, most of them neatly filed under the label of NOSTALGIA, but the simplest way to put it is - laziness. I barely have the time to upload bookish videos and the general upkeep for my channel, let alone an entirely different one. It's a lot of work to start from the ground up. So what I've come to realize is the same logic I used with feeling self conscious about what I was posting on social media; People can deal with me posting different things, they might even like it, and it they don't they can unsubscribe, unfollow, and never look back.
Of course, this has all come up for a reason, and it isn't just because the year 2015 is coming to an end and I feel the need to suddenly do ALL OF THE THINGS I didn't do the other 11 available months of the year. The fact of the matter is that before 2015 even ends, on the 27th of December, I am out of here. I am leaving behind everything I have established in the past year for Oxford, England, where I will be spending the next three months when my parents - University professors - are on sabbatical. I will be experiencing a multitude of newness, to an even sharper degree than packing my life up and moving across the country. Of course everything will still be here when I return, my therapist, family, and friends have all assured me of that, but in essence, the next three months won't count towards my Central New York identity. But they will matter to the person I am becoming and will be for the rest of my life.
I'll go into a lot more detail about this in my next post, but as usual whenever I launch into a series of posts attempting to declare I am back in the blogging business, there needed to be an introduction. In a lengthy 2016 Resolutions video I'm most likely going to procrastinate on scripting after this, I'll have a more detailed explanation of what I hope to accomplish. These posts, A Sonderous Denouement - more on the name later - will catalogue this phase of my life in a way no others have previously. There aren't going to be a ton of images or GIFs or a time spent dedicated to each one. This is my journey and mine alone and hopefully, I'll be so busy living life I'll only have harried amounts of time to document it. I pondered keeping everything private but for the family members as well as the few readers I have left for the blog Loving the Language of Literacy might be interested in hearing about my life. If they don't... I'll have thousands of words worth of embarrassment for posterity's sake.
Tell me in the comments below what you think of the series, if you've struggled with branding / finding and fitting into your niche, and if you've ever had to pack up your entire life... even if it was only for a few months.
Keep calm, Read On, and I'll see you in a new post soon :)
Next Post : The Only Thing to Fear is Your Life Falling Apart... The England Debacle
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