On Creating This Blog, or Reflections on Autistic Hyperfocus in the Individualist Modern Era
The creation process of this blog made me think of what it is like to live in the modern era individualistic culture where all we do is focus on ourselves and how we are perceived by the outside world. Crafting this website, I got absorbed in this culture, tweaking the appearance of my blog endlessly, wondering about my identity, and getting too worked up about how the others would perceive me.
When I mentioned I was working on a blog, I got comments such as “nice, it will look good on your CV”. People seemed to frame blogging as something that bolsters your status to others, making you appear more valuable in the workforce. But the initial idea of mine was to just connect to the outside world on my own terms, without anyone telling me how to communicate. However, the very process of making a part of myself public to the world by creating this blog forced me to think of my identity, my self, from an outside perspective, and so the modern concern of how my image appears to the world took over me.
Modernism, the era we live in now, is characterised by individualism and the abundance of choices we can make. As Liv Strömkvist explains in her book Pythia Speaks (2025), people’s choices used to be easy before the modern time: for example, you would become a smith if your father was a smith and just eat the same food (like radishes) every day. Nowadays, we can choose everything from our career, what we eat for dinner, and various identity markers such as diet and hobbies. Furthermore, we perceive ourselves as unique; the self-help culture advises us to get in touch with our true, authentic identities residing somewhere deep inside of us completely devoid of outside influences.
The process of creating this blog, of making a part of my mind public, forced me to pretend I have this kind of a pure, untouchable core identity. Was I a pixel-art anime enthusiast? A creative artistic person or a more formal academic? I almost choke on the amount of possibilities that can be tweaked: the themes, the colors, the fonts, the images, the texts… At times, I felt as if the universe was going to tell me with absolute certainty what my blog and thus my identity was supposed to look like - I just needed to think hard enough, tweak the colors long enough before something inside of me was going to say: “Yes! The color of code #02494b (dark teal) is the color of my soul!”.
My autistic tendencies also contributed to the obsession over the appearance of my blog. When creating this blog, I entered autistic hyperfocus, meaning an intense focus on a subject of interest often independent of will. I needed to understand everything about how the theme was coded and tweak everything that was tweakable. My intense focus on details and alexithymia (blindness to one’s own emotions) exacerbated the hyperfocus. I forgot all my other responsibilities for hours and days and got exhausted as I was lost in the colors, fonts, and understanding the source code of the blog theme. I fought with AI to change the background color of the blog with no previous website coding skills. Then I switched to image generation, creating cute anime-pixel-art style pictures with AI (see images below). It was supposed to be a small, fun trial; I wasn’t even sure if I even wanted such a profile picture on my blog. But my focus on details combined with my inability to understand what I want well combined with hyperfocus meant I saw endless flaws in the images and endless possibilities to represent my identity. Once, after hours, the firt image was ready, next day I didn’t even want to use it and decided to create another picture.
I lost touch of the bigger picture because of the hyperfocus: I wanted to create a blog to share my thoughts, not to become a some kind of a website developer or a graphic designer. Both the state of hyperfocus and the use of AI provide the comfort of not thinking yourself. It is much more painful to focus on the bigger picture, such as to think whether it is ethical to even use AI for image generation or how I can connect to other people through my blog. All I could focus on was how I could get the blog to best represent me, my unique modern self. Add some stimtoys? Some plants and noise cancelling headphones? Then the others (blog visitors) can have a nice, stable feeling of my identity and whether they want to read the blog.
This is the era of choices, and as an autist, it is especially easy to choke on the abundance of them. The amount of possibilities today is especially draining for us and can lead to loops of indecision, starting from the smallest details to the biggest life choices. As Strömkvist (2025) notes, the more we spend on choices, the more we spend on ourselves. While my intention was to share my thoughts, to open up to the world and connect, the blog process made me turn more inwards, to focus on myself. Can blogs (managed by individuals) ever be something more than a lifestyle process or a CV? As this blog is managed by me, can it ever surpass individualism, my desire to show the others my unique brain content? Can it become a part of something collective, something that is more than a performance of an (un)stable self? We’ll see.