Having my own domain name, my own website, had been a little dream of mine since I started messing around with HTML and CSS in middle school. It’s obviously still very much a work in progress, but every time I open my own homepage, it’s like a warm wash of serotonin.
Whoa.
Hello.
It’s me.
To be frank, I’m still not entirely sold on the name, so maybe I’ll change it one of these days (why do I always pick names that have weird pronunciations?!), but for the moment I’m jeaology and that’s okay.
Jea – ology
The study of “jea”
J.E.A. – my initials
I pronounce it “jay-ology” but anyone else reading it would probably assume the pronunciation is “gee-ology“, and think that I love rocks or some such nonsense. That’s fine. That’s actually pretty damn funny the more I think about it.
Hi, my name is Jea, and I really frickin love rocks!
Welcome to my website! In which I do not actually talk about rocks at all!
Yeah, that sounds about par for the course.
But enough about my cryptic domain name.
Let’s talk about this site’s ephemeral little mascot.
The logo has an important backstory beyond how the drawing looks.
The first time I moved in with someone, I hung one of their art pieces on the wall. They hung up an art piece their sibling had made. They hung up a piece by their mother.
I waited.
I waited a little more.
Then I picked up one of my own pieces, and went to hang it on the wall.
“No, stop. Honestly, I don’t want that on our wall. It’s not good. You have no technique.”
So I bit back tears, and stowed the framed piece in the back of our closet. Told myself that the other person just had different taste, and that they weren’t required to like my art to be in a relationship with me. But as you might expect, things got worse, things escalated through the years, and my own resentment simmered, nauseating, without ever boiling over.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then.
I was at fault.
I was at fault for not taking my space right then and there. I should have picked a righteous argument and hung my piece up anyway. We had nothing but blank, empty space on the walls. I paid half the rent. I moved in with another person, and I immediately let my existence be erased.
You guessed it: the piece I was told (not asked, told) not to put up is currently this website’s logo.
It doesn’t matter that he rejected me.
It matters that I rejected me.
If someone not only loves you, but actually likes you, they’d hang even your shitty macaroni or crayon art up on the wall with pride.
The Right Partner: “Look at what my baby made! It’s ridiculous! Makes me smile, really brightens my day every time I look at it!!!”
No one else has to understand what you see in your person’s art piece.
Or your own art piece.
Progress is worthy of support, too.
It wasn’t one, isolated incident. I was in an environment like that for years, and went through a lot of different things that made it very hard for me to connect with and trust other people. It damaged not only my self-esteem, but my sense of self. I’m still having difficulty expressing who I am.
This site was something I began building toward the end of the worst of those years of self-effacement. The homepage, plastered in a selection of my own drawings regardless of how questionable my technique was, became a blank wall of which I was the sole curator. There was and still is no one to tell me no. The entire site is minimal and experimental. Online, I’ve used the moniker “anthology” (in Japanese) for a great number of years, and that word has influenced my style and thinking as well, nowhere greater than on my eccentric podcast.
Here, I try and fail with impunity.
A purely experimental space.
But whatever happened to the drawing itself?
The real drawing?
Well, it sits framed, in a place of honour in my home, surrounded by other things that hold particular symbolic significance to me. It wouldn’t be wrong to call this spot on the floor an altar. The drawing, an object with particularly strong emotional power, reminds me that I don’t actually need someone else’s permission to exist.
My space is worth growing and protecting.
The same way I’d help someone else grow and protect theirs.
