November 23, 2023

When did this obsession with social media take hold? Was it when my dad got Prodigy in the late 80s and I was suddenly connected to people via message boards? I made connections there I don’t think my still analog brain understood to be different from real life. Through the years I had various blogs, participated in various message boards – sharing every detail of my life with strangers who I thought were friends, but now can’t even remember their names. I was part of a digital scrapbooking community where I posted my kid’s pictures and every detail of their childhoods. Nothing was sacred because the sharing felt intimate, like I was among friends.

Enter Facebook. Now I WAS among friends! My need to share was supercharged. Surely these people were like me, knew me, agreed with me on every aspect of life! Wait… what? My cousin is racist? My uncle is a homophobe? Suddenly everything I thought I knew was tilted. And there was so much to take in and sort through and try to make sense of. Saved posts, watch later youtube lists, read it later apps full of varied, dense information that no brain is equipped to contain. Twitter, Instagram, more blogs, more ways to show the world that I’m here too and look at all the things I can do! Look at all the thoughts I have!

Until there is no thought that doesn’t get formatted into 280 characters. Will it fit in an Instagram caption? No one will read it if it’s too long. Condense, shorten, shrink, twist into something palatable. Every word carefully chosen to impress – who? Thousands of strangers who only hope you’ll follow them if they drop a like or a comment? Now it’s not enough to create for the masses because I don’t even know if the masses are bots. My brain is still living on 80s message boards full of the few people who had heard of Prodigy when the world has moved on to bot farms and buying likes.

Yet, there is still the dopamine release from scrolling a feed and seeing people I “know.” There is still an illusion of connection and community. A brain that sees these faces as friends when they are complete strangers.

Until it starts to feel hollow. Until it starts to feel one sided and completely empty. Until there is the realization that no one really cares, they only want to be noticed too.

For awhile I kept twisting myself to fit whatever would feed the algorithm, or make people like me again. For awhile I thought that sharing everything was the way to connect. Then, a stray comment read here, a thread read there – all causing me to hesitate or abandon completely anything that brings me joy because someone else said it’s lacking. Said it’s not real art, not real poetry, not real enough for a virtual world. They’re right, just not in the way they think they are. It’s not fake because they have put some sort of expectation on content creation, it’s fake because it’s content creation and not just creating.

Here is where I find myself. 34 years into exposing myself to various outlets to try to find some kind of connection in a disconnected world. Feeling guilt when I don’t share my feelings on every world happening, shame when I stay silent because I am empty. Still mining the old for something to feed the machine, since the well of creation has long run dry.

Messages appear when we are ready to see them and I have had three in the last month that have made me reflect:

i. In group therapy, the therapist asked, “If your 80 year old self came and sat down across from you and told you what she wished you had worried less about in your life, what would those things be?” My first thought was social media. She would sit down across from me and say, “Why did you give up so much of yourself to the ether? Why did you not hold something back for yourself? Why did you let strangers tell you how to be and how to make? Why?” I had no answer. Only the deep realization that she was right and that hopefully it wasn’t too late.

ii. I read closely Women Who Run With the Wolves for my women’s literature class. Among the very flowery prose and woo-woo Jungian psychoanalysis, there was a real message that spoke to me. Women have been taught by culture to make ourselves small, silence ourselves, and to let our inner instinctual voice be silenced. We have lost the ways of our matriarchal lineage and all of our stories have been hijacked by men and watered down. Crones made into witches, goddess religions into heresy. In the process women have been made to become dutiful, well behaved creatures who suffer from depression, anxiety, and ennui without quite knowing why. Our creative flow is disrupted by the voices in our heads telling us that we will be shunned or judged if we write that or sculpt this. Our creative rivers have been turned to sludge. Social media plays right into this by telling us what will please the algorithm or the platform (created by men) and we once again give our creativity and minds over to something designed to make us perfect homemakers, curators of the male gaze, and aesthetic influencers. I no longer want to create in this culture of popularity contests. I need to turn from the public eye.

iii. My 3rd point will seem a bit hypocritical after what I’ve just said, but it was a comment I read on Notes, the Twitter-like part of Substack. How would the classic artists have created differently if they had to have a social media presence to be creatives who were noticed? Would they have played it safe and not developed their own style? The comment asked the question of whether art is about validation or valuation. Do I want to be validated by the masses for what I create or do I want to create something that has lasting value for myself? I choose the latter.

I have come to disdain the need to create a brand, an aesthetic, to even fit into a genre. I hope artists start stretching their limbs and trying new things. I hope they never stop growing.

I’ve decided to stop creating in public for awhile. To stop posting anything art related whether that be collage or writing. I don’t plan to leave social media altogether, just change the way I interact with it. I want to begin to create in private, in solitude, in a cave of my own making. I don’t want to think about social media so much. I have no plan for the future where all of this is concerned. I’m not putting a time limit on it. I’m simply sitting with the feeling that for now I’m ok not creating at all or creating for my eyes only. This is very removed from the past reasons when I would step back from socials. This is not because I am running away from myself or cringing at what I’ve made. It’s not because I want to escape. It’s because I want to run to myself. I want to value what I make. I want to hear my own voice again.

I’ve privated my Instagram account and it may become more of a place where I just ramble or share my personal stuff. I don’t have a plan. I do want to stay connected to the people I have come to love. Not just imaginary connections giving me shots of dopamine, but the real ones who I care deeply about. Our journeys have crossed paths for too long to go it alone now.