The other day someone asked me “how I described myself.” Although I wrote about the question of labeling the other week, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it since. Answering this question causes me to stumble a bit because I know that by providing a precise answer I am not only limiting how others see me, but how I view myself as well. Each time I pick one or the other, I am putting one descriptor (writer? ethnographer? researcher? crafter? artist?) first, instead of welcoming the host of things I have crafted my life around.

At times I am each of those things, sometimes I am all of those at once. Of course, I also recognize that perhaps I might be more successful if I was more adept at picking one direction and sticking with it instead of eyeing the world through multiple lenses. But embracing the more interdisciplinary aspects of my practice not only serves to keep things interesting, it also keeps my life going on the right course holistically. Because not only do I think it is imperative to act consciously in praxis, I also think that your work should have some synchronicity with how you live (craft?) your life.

And, of course, when that world is opened to you, everything becomes clearer, but not necessarily easier. When I started reading the works of individuals like Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag and Sharon Zukin, I was at first astounded to be reading something so copacetic to my own thoughts, inviting instead of alienating. The irony was that in welcoming their work, I had to shed an old skin that I had been harboring for years- as it made me view the world as a whole entity again instead of just disparate pieces.

Part of that discovery comes over the old archives of this here blog, which I started out of little but curiosity and a passion for craft theory and how individuals embrace their lives once they welcome craft and creativity into it. The other day I wrote this in comment to someone’s blog post:

the interesting part about blogging is that to me it’s part sociology experiment and part love letter to the world. because you’re writing little posts about the way *you* view the world, which is most likely unique to anyone else’s and you’re also casting it out to the world and random wierd google searches that random people find you through.

and while i get comments and emails from friends, it’s always lovely to hear from someone who found you haphazardly who just says something along the lines of ‘wow.’ that’s definitely worth all the scary spam about poker and refinancing.

After I wrote it I felt like a big dork, but at the same time, couldn’t shake the phrase “little tiny love letters.” And how the internet has allowed us to more holistically embrace our lives via discovering (sometimes quite randomly) individuals who blur the lines just as much as we do. Lately I have been conducting more dialogue about craft theory than I ever thought possible several years ago. And it’s been beautiful.

And part of me knows that if I had labeled myself intially and stuck firm, I would have pinned myself in a corner. In this era where the web allows us to make connections and collaborate from afar, the more labels we construct, the less likely we are to stumble on one another’s paths that may run parallel. And who knows, in running parallel, we might just one day connect and run together, collectively gaining strength on little else but a refusal of self-definition and an embracement of creativity.