I started keeping my blog 17 years ago.
I had just finished my Bachelors degree in Art and Design at the local university centre in my home town, and all I knew is that I wanted to progress and get more exposure as an artist.
That summer was messy. My entire social world in my home town revolved around an indie bar which became a more toxic and paranoid environment as a larger reality loomed. The party was over – both for up and coming indie bands and socialites and for the larger economic order.
I was increasingly in a state of anxiety over my future, infused with a growing sense of distrust and paranoia, and I agreed to go to the Leeds Festival with a gang from this scene. After 2 days of insomnia, which led me into a hyper-paranoid state I had my only ever psychotic episode.
In a moment of narcissistic hell, everybody in the entire festival was calling my name. “John Ledger, John Ledger!”. I’d only had a small bit of public accolade and exposure from featuring the local paper after the degree show, but this had escalated into a sense that everybody had eyes on me. And, momentarily, I could hear things that weren’t real.
After that, I got a job at a local gallery. Which is in the fact the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Which is only a few miles from my home.
And the rockiness began to subside, and for the next two years, I had started to build myself up as an artist and writer. Increasingly using blogging to share what I was creating.
It was originally on Blogspot. I was encouraged by a more cock-sure artist at the high-flying Glasgow School of Art, who happened to be the brother of a woman I thought I had a chance of a relationship with at the time.
I transferred my blog to WordPress in 2012, at a time when the social media giant Facebook was perhaps at its most popular.
When I began blogging in 2007, Facebook was still a bit so-so. It had no more gravitas than Myspace. I’d never heard of Instagram or Twitter. Did they exist way back then?
As we all buckled up for the austerity ride, full of misleading statements that gave us a sense that we ‘were in it together’ and that there was even a ecological morality to the cut backs, none of us except life’s chancers could have been prepared for what came next.
I imagined austerity as a great leveller, but soon I began to see a society more divided and exclusive than ever. Social media initially seemed like a tool to ignite change, but quickly became a tool to enforce high maintenance social envy, or what we’d begin to call ‘fomo’, and to enforce and escalate divisions. What once seemed like a tool to seek a better future quickly became what my late art tutor would come to call ‘the last battle ground of Thatcherism’.
Over the coming years, my work improved, but got heavier and heavier, as my 30’s closed in, and I found myself increasingly isolated and in need of a better income, but lacking any sense of how to do this. The need for connection became greater, but so did shame and self-hate. Drinking became a more lonesome and regular evening pursuit, and addictive and destructive behaviours began to play out on social media.
I cannot find a better word to describe what the experience of what has happened over the last 15 years+ but ‘traumatic‘. I wonder what my life track would have been like, without this transition towards ‘instant everything’. And with a background ambience of every thinkable catastrophe, I cannot help but wonder what shape they’d had taken, minus the collective induced-effect of social media on all of us.
The cruelest aspect of shame and self-hate is that it sets up the conditions to act in ways so that it becomes justified: if you spend most your day thinking your repulsive you’ll likely act in ways that begin to prove it. I think about this when I see certain criminal actions, and I think about my own future plight with cold-blooded dread.
Art, artist, me as an artist. This is something I have clung to for identity and self-worth increasingly more desperately over the last ten years. But it increasingly causes more pain than pleasure, I try to find self-worth keeping the oil burning, but then start succumbing to seriously negative thinking and then start drinking. All my biggest regrets in life began on evenings like this.
I’ve never been what is now called ‘normative’, I’ve never been good in competitive work environments – which is most work environments these days. Advice of all kinds ricochets inside my head, none of it makes sense anymore. I don’t really know what to do anymore, and cut and paste advice to this doesn’t make sense either.
So many ‘should haves’. Wish I’d learned how to stand up for myself at school. Wish I’d had the opportunity for an Autism assessment whilst young. Wish I’d had stayed longer at the Eating Disorder clinic. Wish I’d never got into the drinking culture. More than anything, wish I’d had recognised where all of this was heading at an earlier stage.
I’ve deleted social media. It really doesn’t matter anymore if I’m viewed as an artist or not. It all merely feels like a pantomime act for a past life now. But I can never delete this blog. Bloggers, the infamously ridiculed ‘balding middle aged losers still living with their mum’. Who cares what they think anymore? This blog will survive until WordPress dies.
John B Ledger 