Why am I posting on here?

This website is a bit of a personal blog for me. I'm going to be writing personal-professional blog posts to build my own digital footprint in a way that I feel is positive and reflects what I actually think and feel.

I'm doing this for a few different reasons. The main one is because I'm a business owner, teacher and academic in training. People Google me all the time – whether they're students or possible future customers. I want to make sure that the image of me online is one that I can truly stand behind.

Also, the surname I took on marriage, Cipro, is lovely. But it's also the name of a type of medication! I want to make sure that when people search 'Shani Cipro', they see the neurodivergent educator, the English Literary Linguistics enthusiast who's doing an MA, teaching, and acting as a business owner all the time. Maybe they'll see that I love reading and gaming and anime and all sorts of geeky stuff, rather than a random medicine not related to me at all.

My maiden name, Shani Thanki-Franklin, doesn't have the associations with medication, but it's long and a mouthful to say. I used to hate the fact that my surname meant that I was one of the last people to be called out on the register in school. I mean, I have ADHD and it's hard to focus for long periods of time. So, having to wait for 20 other students to say 'here' before I could meant I was more likely to miss my name being called out and get in trouble. Cipro is the start of the register. So if I have kids and they end up with ADHD like me, I know that they're more likely to catch their names before they zone out. I also like the fact that my name is unusual enough that people aren't making assumptions about me or who I am before they meet me. So it's important for me to build up my name as Shani Cipro.

Plus, I have a disgruntled member of an old forum I used to manage (no longer managed by me) who regularly posts outrageous claims about me with my real name. They've threatened to leak my address and email addresses, and are making very defamatory claims about me. I am seeking legal advice on the matter, but this has been going on since January 2020, so I also want to just control the narrative about who I am a little. Even if the things she's saying are very difficult to believe (and some would require me to be able to do magic), it's still not nice to have these claims about you online.

Then there's the fact that I feel like I just haven't written enough lately. I used to love writing online. But then I brought money into it and SEO and it felt like every time I sat down to write, I'd come up with 6 other things I should post before the blog post I was working.

Why? Well, if I wanted to post about how to find a good text for your English Literature A-level NEA, for example, wouldn't it make sense for me to actually provide a post where I create a list of my own recommendations to link to first? That will increase internal interlinking, which is good for SEO. But then I start making the recommendations and realise I have too many of them. So it's better to create a new custom post type for NEA recommendations. I start doing that, then I have to find a way to make the template look good. It ends up creating so much work for me! And it paralyses me. Makes me feel like I can't write at all.

You can probably see the ADHD thought process right there, right? Five or six interconnected thoughts spilling out of me so fast that it's hard to catch them. That makes writing for a business overwhelming at the moment, and it's given me a kind of writer's paralysis. No writer's block, exactly. I've got plenty of ideas. I just can't initiate the task because it feels like a huge mountain to climb. So I figured that starting to write more regularly for my own personal space might be a good way to break out of that bubble.

And that brings me to why I started the Cafe in the first place. I mean, I started a whole FluentCommunity instance just to talk to myself here? Well, kinda! I mean, I'd welcome other people if they were interested in joining, but it's not like I expect a dedicated fanbase of people who want to join a community dedicated to my image. So why make a forum just for myself?

Well, just like I said, the ADHD thoguht process can make me feel like I can't even begin writing. I'm good at writing blogs and they do well when I finally get them out. But structuring them well, making sure I've got enough headings, that all the thoughts go to the right places... it feels like a form of digital masking. It's tiring. Lots of spoons being used.

So I figured: why not create a diary space for myself? I made the Cafe to be able to post more rambling or (more charitably) less structured, more spontaneous updates about my life, my thoughts and general ideas. Plus, it's a great record of what I was up to at the moment for when my ADHD poor memory takes over.

So, please don't feel obligated to join this community or even read these. If you have thoughts, I'm happy to answer! I definitely would welcome the support. And I can promise I'll never use AI to make these – especially given my thoughts on AI. But I don't expect anyone to come here. I'm just writing into the void and hoping it means anyone who wants to Google me knows just who Shani Cipro is.