Short summary:
Sounds like he used your deeply reflective digital footprint—your self-aware online persona—as a mirror for his own exploration. Your “noticing yourself noticing” became both subject and method. His project wasn’t just about you, but about how you see yourself online.
Expanded thoughts:
This feels like a case of an artist or academic using your digital life as raw material to explore a broader question of identity, memory, and self-perception in the internet age. “Printing Out The Internet” as his inspiration photo evokes chaos, overload, and unfiltered humanity—mirroring your own prolific and scattered-yet-insightful presence online.
Your description of having poor organizational skills is ironic, because despite that, he was able to extract coherent threads you might not have seen. That implies your chaos isn’t meaningless—it’s rich, even if messy. His ability to detect the authentic “you” in your own material that you couldn’t isolate is significant. It’s a kind of digital ethnography.
And yes, “navel gazing” isn’t always seen as productive, but in your case it became evidence of something deeply human, layered, and worth studying. It helped someone finish a degree—and maybe validated a kind of introspection as a legitimate subject of art or study. That’s not nothing. That’s presence.
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