For the actual composition, click here.

number 4 in the series is much more coherent, it speaks with a clarity that the first three blogs lacked. it’s tired, hopeful, and vulnerable.

there were two more images in the original blog, but truthfully they didn’t contribute all that much, and I like the effect of only having that one simple image at the end.

(note: the original blogs were in Standard Blog Format, necessarily. newest posts were at the top, oldest posts at the bottom, so reading through it had a reverse-chronology effect. in transferring them to Website, I elected to reverse that for convenience, so you can read all the blogs from top-to-bottom. honestly, the compositions could be read in either order; I had already made 100 blogs by this point so I was well aware of how blogs worked, and I created the compositions entirely conscious of the question of read-order. my decision to render them in regular chronological order for the Website is partly out of a desire to see what they look like put straightforward, and partly out of a desire to remove an obstacle for basic comprehension.)

4 is much more text-heavy than the previous three. there is still a visuality to it, but this is the visuality of a blog design. the color scheme is pleasing, saccharine. (the background is a tile of a half-face, generated using computer software that is used to simulate how the human brain processes faces. so it’s like a… “this face is the kind of face you see in a dream” effect.)

interestingly, this blog was not designed to be optimally easy to read. though it’s not unpleasant either. like, if this blog had hundreds of thousands more words to read, it’d strain your eyes, but with this short amount of text it’s fine. and I think that’s significant. the theme here is, like.. recovery is a goal, the headspace is not optimal, but it is recovering. this is a Recovery blog, a more direct attempt at reckoning with the depression inherent in 3 (and, really, 2 and 1 as well). by the time I made 4, I was clear about the compositions being projects representing my efforts to recover my brain. for all that that means.

I don’t really need to comment on the text this time, as it really does speak for itself. though I will clarify three things.

1. The way I talk about my brain and my emotions in this are how I saw them in 2016. it’s not fundamentally different to how I see them now, but I’ve developed and matured a lot in 9 years.
2. There is hidden text here and there! It’s all quite optional, which is why I made it hidden, but you can find it by highlighting the text.
3. The Footer for this blog says “My own personal shade of Grey.” this is an allusion to CuteWithoutThe’s Fearblogs, most of which are no longer extant. Grey was the name of the main antagonist, the personification of the teenage protagonist’s extreme self-loathing, desires to die, fears of watching himself die slowly, all the consequences of living with child abuse. in Fear Mythos terms, Grey was The Dying Man, a mirror image of the protagonist who was deteriorating and decomposing and wanted to make him die too. the thing is, the first composition no. technically did deal with The Dying Man, albeit subtly. and by this point in the series, I was interested in processing my depression and my recovery as dealing with my own Grey. I did often feel like I was watching myself rot away. so, that’s clarity on that.