Tanvi Bhakta

Giving baby tanvi what she wants

I’ve been reading since I was four years old because my mother only had so many hours in the day to tell me stories. Her and dad had full time jobs, and I was an intelligent kid - that meant I had to be kept occupied. I was also a lonely kid; so the stories became a lifeline. #

Growing children recreate what they know. When my brother was born (and I was handed babysitting duty), I spent so much time making up stories based on characters we saw around us - ben ten, the monkeys on the banana trees, the youtubers of de jure. I wrote the first seven chapters of a fantasy novel set in a high school in America featuring prominently: eggs that cracked to reveal descendants [of whom??] from Atlantis, some standard misunderstood kid bullied situation, and my current crush at the time (a boy I had spent about ten minutes with who had light brown eyes). #

My best friend and I learnt P language, wrote parodies of pop songs about loving pizza, and invented new melodies inspired by evanescence. When I was younger, creation was just something I did with all the energy that was generated from consumption and a boredom and a long commute. #

Then, I discovered that an internet existed beyond Club Penguin and 4share.com (a website to share pdfs of novels). My most vivid experience of consuming blogs was remittancegirl.com (NSFW) - a blog by an author containing erotica erotic literature that she treating with such care, intention, and quality that I thought… hmm. I would like to be the kind of person that produces work like this. #

Failures so far: #

  1. Several diaries (I tore them up. Now I regret it. There was a lot of angst that I thought was cringe, but now I just want to hug baby Tanvi and tell her that she is going to grow up and be so good) #
  2. Quora answers - I think this counts because I used to go find questions that I wanted to write about and then answer them #
  3. A wordpress blog - I couldn’t find the exact URL at the time of posting #
  4. A weebly blog - lots of poetry, emotions, sexual/political themes. I hid it from people for a long time but now I think sex is a normal thing for 17-year-olds with inappropriate exposures to the internet to spend a long time thinking about. I might migrate my work from that blog to this one eventually. No, I’m still not going to link to it though, but if you ask me I’ll probably tell you! #
  5. Medium - mostly for a specific project #
  6. Instagram - 2016 to 2019 I used it mostly for archival, and a brief fashion blog. I retired that when a) the mechanics changed to being doom scrolling, and b) I discovered twitter #
  7. Twitter - 2018 to 2020. Arguably the most famous I have been on the Internet. I want to an Anthropic event in 2025 (5 years after activity!) and someone asked me if I was tanvi.css. Yes! But also no. I started it because I was doing a lot of networking but I ended up writing about my health, and my personal politics. This changed the kinds of conversations I ended up having with new people, and it felt stifling, so I just quit it one day and didn’t look back. #

Over the last two years, I have gotten into the habit of writing up my week, and slowly built up the muscle of developing clarity of thought enough to Blog. But I want a real blog - a web log, if you will - that allows me to come back to my own thoughts and track progress, draw conclusions, witness (my) history. I’ve written before about what I want from this blog, and that doesn’t change. But the personal-website side of the internet can be a lonely place, and if I am not fundamentally writing for myself, the writing will not happen. #

Big inspiration: visakan’s twitter, itihas.review. #

I have very poor autobiographical memory, and I want this blog to be proof-of-life for all my major thoughts. I miss writing about low-stakes bullshit that is nonetheless important to my self-perception. Did the tree really fall in the forest if no one was there to hear it? My lonely 4-year-old self just wants to be heard to know that she exists, and everything that has followed has been in pursuit of making that happen. #