a meditation on being here, sometimes

but not being here, other times

i have reached the point where i haven’t had instagram on my phone for nearly a year (or at least six months; who’s counting?) and every time i download it to post something or go on it on my pc browser to check my messages, i end up feeling kind of unwell and uneasy. it’s for a number of reasons:

• progressive mental overload

• progressive mental underwhelm

• knowing i’m missing out

• feeling guilty about missing out when i shouldn’t have

• feeling bad about missing out when i would have liked not to - at this point the amount of friends i’ve cut out because i found out about their inconsideration via social media is not at zero and i don’t love that

• feeling weirded out about the concept of being known and seen and perceived, always, perpetually

• knowing things i was never meant to know about people’s business because it’s now okay to make other people’s stuff your business.

i didn’t really plan to use substack to write on much, just to keep up with content that doesn’t make me feel awful (awful as in why don’t i look/act/be like that, not awful as in seeing tragedy) - but i continually seek to find a space online where i can just be, and maybe this is that? maybe it isn’t, though. i guess the only way out is through, and the only way to find out is by doing it a bit. i have a lot of thoughts, but i don’t necessarily feel like they’re thoughts i can follow to any sort of logical conclusion or neat little package (maybe this is a shortcoming of mine, but i think it’s more likely because things are so rarely as tidy as i’d like them to be). basically wouldn’t it be nice to exist somewhere without the pressure of marketing oneself? but wherever there are followers there is marketing to be done, so i don’t know how that will go at all. i would like to say i won’t be pandering or seeking that. in all of this, i often miss the bioluminescent community of tumblr, where you could find community in really passionately liking almost anything - but if i think about my days there, they were also warped by wanting big numbers and feeling shitty that the internet didn’t think i was that funny. i do not honestly know if it is possible for me (not one, but myself, at least) to exist without the constant push and pull between wanting to be loved, seen, and cared for, and wanting to cease asking for affirmation because i am enough. the things that are healthiest for us are seldom easy or intuitive. if they were i suppose we could just stop there.

i have always loved the idea of a family newsletter, but i find there are likely less and less people that care about what i’m doing in a readable capacity, and i have less and less to report. i have a home. i’m not having kids. i’m trying this and that, and leaning this way and that way, and even when i try to pull the rug out from under myself in every way possible it’s still something i find hard to take up space with at the dinner table with a friend when they’re eager to know what i’ve been up to for the past three months. what can i say? i’m bad at catching up. i don’t know what i have to say to folks who want to catch up with me, because my external world is rich with stimulus and care, but my internal world is richer.

life is fortunately stable - stable housing, stable relationship, stable job, an array of hobbies to cycle through from now until the end of time. the less i know about a lot of things the better, and trying to execute on that knowledge is hard as hell. but watch me.