Imma fight imposter syndrome with a blog

Often I don't talk to people much about creative projects I'm doing even though I'm super excited about them, because I think they're niche and long to explain. Part of my reluctance to talk about myself and my work is because of how ADHD manifests for me: I get quite bored of giving information to others because I know it already. Another part of the reluctance is related to being a woman and it being generally more tiring and less socially encouraged for me to talk about me. And maybe the worst of all, and the one I don't want to admit, is that I avoid talking about it because that's putting my work out there for potential rejection, or worse, indifference.

But the thing is, if I never talk about what I'm doing, I don't get practiced in doing it and I don't get praised. That leads me into a loop of imposter syndrome and poor self esteem when it comes to creative job stuff.

I'm wondering if maybe just writing it down is an easier way of talking about it. Writing is one of the few creative things that I find useful and I can feel quite free about. Doing Substack sporadically in the last months has helped me with some of my more personal quandries. I want to carry on using Substack as a silly, deep and nurturing place. Since I'm spending so much of my time on work now, what I need now is a girlboss place.

I've been getting quite into productivity youtubers recently and I just saw a guy's video about making a website in 2023. Mainly his point was that a website should be a place to share content (i.e. blog) if you want people to find you.

I love any excuse to make a website. I've been doing this since I was ten on Piczo embedding the Black Eyed Peas videos onto the site announcing it as my song of the week. I've been doing this since I was seven on Neopets pasting HTML into my pets' pages to jazz them up with pixellated dolls in gothy princess outfits. I have my family to thank for encouraging my interest in the digital world very early on when they bought me books about code (it's so Asian to get your 7 year old to study a vocational skill I know).

What stuck with me about what the youtuber said was that the site isn't about how it looks but the content on it, which was quite different to my previous ways of thinking on what a personal website can do. I've been thinking about it as an identity-based thing, like Who Am I, rather than What Should I Say. I thought of an individual site as being more like a portfolio, but really as a blog a website might be able to do more for me.

So I told myself I would start to benefit from my internet skills by posting my work-related writing on a website and label this 'Jade Chao'. This can help me by giving validation to the various projects I've been freelancing on and holding onto in my head. It's gunna be a place for me to figure out creative things I'm stuck on, what I learned from smart people I've talked to. And hopefully if I keep doing it then it'll change my mindset that I'm unqualified to talk about this or that, because actually I have been talking about this and that for a while, and there's online proof of it.