My Website was a Hidden Body I had to Show to Strangers

As many other people I have spoken to recall, when the decade rolled into 2020 there were deep feelings that dramatic change would come. And for better or for worse, we were all right–although not necessarily in the ways we had hoped. But as spring of 2020 and a global pandemic arrived, I attempted to complete a task that had always been so daunting for me: create an online portfolio.

I decided on Wix as I had seen a friend on Instagram used it and meticulously tried to piece together a gallery of my works. In spite of this effort I have yet to launch it officially because it is mentally filed under "a work in progress," or more of a virtual and private archive of sorts. What exactly would qualify the site as "ready" remained a mystery to me. But it is also why one of Schwulst's paragraphs in My Website is a Shifting House Next to a River of Knowledge struck me: "A website can be anything. It doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) be an archive of your complete works. That’s going to be dead the moment you publish. A website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished. It’s imperfect—maybe sometimes it even has a few bugs. But that’s the beauty of it. Websites are living, temporal spaces. What happens to websites after death, anyway?)" This quote resonated with me, so much so that I felt what can only be described as embarrassment and feelings of shame as well as flickers of inspiration and amusement.

Although I do feel a bit sheepish about my attitude towards my website now, Schwulst's viewpoint also takes the pressure away of publishing a "finished" website. Moving forward I would like to take her advice and have my website be a plant which grows with me; something to remind me that neither my website nor my creative practice have to be faultless or a fully completed, marketable package. As I change and progress, my site can change with me or be thrown away and buried by time and the constant stream of information. This choice doesn't really matter–it's just a website, nothing less or more.