Digital identities scare me. Over the past 2 years I’ve widely considered deleting Facebook. Time and time again, my news feed only seems to add more noise to my life than not, yet there isn’t a week where I don’t scroll through and absorb up the content for hours on end.

Could I unplug myself? Escape from all social media? Probably not. Despite the noise, the platform has done everything from connect me with great opportunities to being great sources of group communication. I landed my first college internship from a Facebook jobs page. I’ve joined amazing organizations because I was invited to Facebook events. I found my first hackathons to attend in high school because of curated Facebook groups. It’s quite literally changed my life.

To an extent, I’m dependent on social media to keep me digitally present. I very much care about maintaining my Facebook account, as do I for all of my social media. I want to be relevant. Spread my impact. Meet and connect with new people. Who I am online does matter.

And yet, I have to give up control for how that information is displayed and used. I only get 200 characters to write a bio. My opinions and thoughts are filtered into algorithms, which rank them against hundreds of others in trying to decide what to prioritize at the top and what to hide.

That scares me.

I’m scared that a glance across the different types of media of me on the internet don’t depict who I actually am. And because of that, I restrict myself. I wait to post the pixel perfect moments. Highlight-reel quality or bust. It can feel pretty fake sometimes.

I thought I might tackle this issue by starting up a blog, but even there I faced a similar dilemma. Is the value of what I write correlated with the number of Medium claps I get? Should I encourage people to write responses? When the hell did I get followers? And then all of a sudden, I had another platform I felt like I had to watch what I say. More careful planning to share the thoughts in my head.

Purchasing adhiv.com was supposed to be my way out.

Having a personal website gives me a special place on the internet where I can put whatever the hell I want, whenever I want, to the entire world. I have full freedom over how I get to craft my digital identity.

I don’t get to majorly influence your Facebook feed or speak novels through Twitter threads, but at least there’s this special place on the internet where I can put whatever the hell I want, when I want, to the entire world.

Yet even here, very quickly found 2 issues with personal websites:

  1. Few people visit them recurringly
  2. They’re not scalable (adding new content and structure means writing new HTML/CSS/JS)

It’s been about two years since I’ve redesigned my personal website and a year since I’ve posted about anything on a blog.

When I first set up my Medium blog, I thought I would write out my thoughts on a monthly basis. That never happened. Did I get busy? Have nothing interesting to talk about? Scared about sounding stupid?

I’m still not really sure. Maybe all of the above.

Growth

What I do know is that in the past 2 years of college I’ve grown a lot. I’m surrounded by new friends and apartment mates. I’ve joined three amazing new organizations. I’ve started a startup and failed. Many of my opinions have grown outdated. I’m thinking a lot more about career, fulfillment, and community.

I wish I could take a snapshot of my thoughts and goals from every year of my life and overlay them to see all the change. There was a time in my freshman year of high school when I genuinely believed I could make it by dropping out of high school to start a company. No kidding. My personal website and Medium used to say, “trapped high schooler, budding entrepreneur”.

As much as a mistake dropping out would have been, to be able to read an article about my own justifications for those ideas would speak to me more than anything about how I’ve grown from a life-principles standpoint. Would I be slightly embarrassed that it’s publicly accessible? Probably yes. I’m a little shocked now at even considering the idea. But I’d be a lot prouder of being able to witness the kinds of thoughts going through my head as an early teenager just beginning to form my opinion on the world.

It’s hard to measure growth qualitatively, but actively putting out thoughts and getting feedback on them is one of the best ways to grow. I want this to be an iterative process and have my ideas battle tested. Over time, I want to be able to disagree with myself and picture who I was at the time of writing.

It’s not necessarily about having novel ideas or the right opinions. For me personally, there’s a growing opportunity cost for every month I don’t write. I know this because I’d probably shell out $30 to know what was going on in my head at age 15. By the time I’m 40, I don’t want to look back at my 20s and wonder what was going on either. This blog accessible and critique-able by anyone on the internet, but it’s mainly for me.

It always feels like it’s too late to start, but I’m really going to try this time. Hence, I’ve redesigned adhiv.com and am starting up adhiv.xyz. They represent (respectively) a blueprint of me and a whiteboard of my thoughts. Final PDF and draft Word doc. Static and dynamic. Identity and growth.