On Starting a Blog

As of August 26th, I officially started my blog. For ease of updating, I used the same blogging website that we used for this class, although I did choose a slightly different background and theme. I chose the name "The Okay-ish OT" as a pun off the TV show "The Good Doctor," out of a desire to find humor in the unfortunately overused stereotype that all autistic people must be geniuses. Of course, I hope to be more than okay-ish in my career someday, but I felt like the alliteration fit, so I kept it.

There were a few bumps in the road at first; I couldn't figure out how to change the font colors, or how to make an author profile, but with the use of the help button, I was quickly on my way to a functioning blog. I started with an "About the Author" page, just a quick intro with my goals for the blog, what my posts would look like, and what my experiences were with the topics I would be discussing.

Next, I had to decide on my first discussion topic, which I decided should be about my experiences in moving to a new house as a person with a disability. When I googled this out of curiosity, most perspectives were from parents talking about their experiences with moving when they had a kid with a disability, so there weren't many opinion pieces similar to what I wrote myself. While I mentioned my status as an OT student in my blog, I made sure to note that my blog spoke to personal experience, not to a particular degree or qualifications, since I'm still working towards those things. I'll likely continue this disclaimer throughout my blog.

In our class readings, we learned about the idea of self vs societal influences in finding meaning in an event, or in oneself. When I talked about my experiences moving, I spent a lot of time talking about the amazing role of my family in the success of my move, helping me clean the spiderwebs out of my sketchy windows, renting a pressure-washer to get rid of bees’ nests, and filling my pantry with groceries before they left. Overall, I would count my move as a success, but my move was meaningful both because of what I left behind and because of who helped me along. Even though moving away or moving out is generally seen as a sign of independence, the actual act of moving would be nearly impossible with only one person, with all the heavy lifting involved.

Blogging is also seen as a fairly solitary event, but the most interesting topics are those which involve other people. Therefore, I would say that for my blog, its value comes from my experiences in the social sphere more than it does from my experiences as an individual, so it would fall more on the social side of the continuum we talked about in our readings.

No blog is an island unto itself, as the saying goes.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of thought goes into creating a blog, especially one around such a convoluted topic like autism. Our readings talked about both calculative and meditative thinking, and I would say that writing involves both. Meditative thinking would be addressed more in the inward reviewing of my own experiences, taking stock of the skills I utilized and deciding which things to share in my blog, while calculative thinking would involve the organization, vocabulary, and general flow of information in it. Calculative thinking could also include looking for sources for claims I made or researching other's experiences with this topic. As I gain experience with the practice of blogging, I could see myself using calculative thinking more automatically as I grow used to the format and flow, but meditative thinking will continue to be needed, given that much of my writing will be on self-reflection.

Overall, the experience of blogging has been going pretty well, and I've enjoyed being able to dedicate time to my interests while still being able to call it homework. I look forward to seeing how my blog progresses throughout the term.