on identity - by connie - web surfing

Every winter break, the last two weeks of the year where nothing is going on, I remake my portfolio. In the past, it was because I was on the eternal treadmill of becoming a UX designer. But now, recognizing the fragility of that identity as a basis for my entire self1 and emboldened by the liminality of a new year, I sought to make a website as a reinvention of myself. It’s strange to call portfolios and websites as portraits of ourselves, but we are already painters in our digital presence. In an interview I read recently in Syntax Mag, Maya Man mentions: Social media is a digital memory of who we were at certain points of time and what we found important enough to share2. To post is to be perceived and to be perceived is to be known which is in turn, a form of becoming. However this idea of perception becomes a self-imposed prison. I watched myself through the lens of how I thought others would see me, which turned into subtle creeping fears that if I put myself out there earnestly,

Every winter break, the last two weeks of the year where nothing is going on, I remake my portfolio. In the past, it was because I was on the eternal treadmill of becoming a UX designer. But now, recognizing the fragility of that identity as a basis for my entire self1 and emboldened by the liminality of a new year, I sought to make a website as a reinvention of myself. It’s strange to call portfolios and websites as portraits of ourselves, but we are already painters in our digital presence. In an interview I read recently in Syntax Mag, Maya Man mentions: Social media is a digital memory of