Since Feeling Is First
I spend more time thinking about the ways my life isn't what I want it to be than I do on anything else, mixed in with a sprinkling of how everyone else is happier than me. This is always the thing my brain gets stuck on. Not people who are more successful, I don't care about that, but people who are happier. It's not even exactly that I'm unhappy, not on a small scale, not in my day to day. But nothing about my current circumstances is what I want. I hate where I live, in terms of location and in terms of actual housing, and I very rarely get to see the people I love in person, and I am not in a good financial situation, and I don't feel able to be fully and openly the person I've been trying to become, and so much about my body is fodder for criticism and discontent, and on and on it goes.
Some of these are real and legitimate complaints and I lack the resources to change them right now, but some of them are things that could be changed, or at least shifted, with a lot of dedicated work and patience. The problem is that I am completely devoid of patience and am only interested in things that bring me instant gratification, so when something takes time and effort and I'm not able to immediately see rewards from it, I become frustrated. Not a recipe for success.
I've been reading about slow living recently and thinking about how it might apply to my current life and this problem of discontent and impatience. If you don't know what slow living is, this is a pretty good overview with a stressful amount of links to further reading and resources. I already live pretty slowly in a lot of ways, and as I've been working on taking tiny steps toward decluttering my digital life, I've been rethinking what I might do with the time I usually spend online. There are so many things I've wanted to do for years, things I've said I'm going to learn and practice and create, and I never do any of them because I might not be good at them and being bad at something is literally worse than death according to my exhausting, dramatic brain. But wouldn't it be nice to do something just to do it? To experiment and take steps and see what happens? To add things to my life that aren't for public consumption, that aren't done with the sole purpose of monetizing them or using them to gain followers? Don't I deserve to have some things I do just to make myself happy, or to improve my space, or to un-stick myself from the perpetual stasis that is my normal existence?
Like, look at this article I was reading earlier today, about how to have a successful Instagram. This is something I don't even aspire to, because Instagram feels like the most pointless waste of time of all the things I do on my phone. I can't even see photos, which is part of it, but it's also just so much effort for so little reward. I don't want to be an influencer of any kind, on any platform, ever. Influencers give me hives. The only reason I even have Instagram is that sighted people love visuals and, whether I like it or not (I don't), I live in a sighted world and sighted people are always going to make up the majority of the potential audience for my writing. I would prefer to just focus on the words, the whole reason I'm doing this, but I don't feel like I can. And that's how I learned that there's a WikiHow article about curating a successful Instagram account, because there's a WikiHow article for everything you can imagine. Which is kind of a beautiful thing and a great example of why the internet should exist, except when it's about this.
What a lot of steps and a lot of work and a lot of thinking about photos and the audience for those photos. When are you supposed to actually be present in your life if you're always trying to capture it perfectly with a camera and then filtering it and hashtagging it and frantically trying to get other people to look at it? How are you supposed to separate the personal from the public? This is not a good way to build or sustain authentic, meaningful relationships with other human beings. And maybe that's not what it's about for the people who do this. Maybe they're fulfilled by the work of becoming internet famous. Good for them, genuinely, if that's the case. It certainly provides some of them with a lot of money, and wouldn't that also be nice? I just don't think it would be worth it to me personally, even if I thought I could ever be good at it, which I don't.
I know this is all a little bit old man yells at cloud. That's the role I seem to have slotted into during this era of my life. It's okay, I'm embracing it. But the thing is, I love the internet. I really do. I came of age with it, for better or worse, and it's where I've formed some of the strongest friendships in my life, and it's where I discovered so many facets of my identity, and it's been a vital outlet for me for many years. I just wish it didn't feel increasingly like it's draining my soul dry. And I wish I didn't feel required to engage with it in a way that isn't healthy for me in order to get more eyeballs on the words I spew onto the screen.
Because the other thing is, connection is what everything is about for me. I heard someone on a podcast the other day say that her version of spirituality is physical, in the world, connecting with people and doing direct action to help them and improve their lives in tangible ways. God is real and it's that physical closeness, that touch and grounding and demonstration of love. God is the kindnesses we extend to one another as we move through the world. This is something that resonated so deeply, something I've always felt but never knew how to articulate. God is human tenderness, hands on skin and breath passed from mouth to mouth and sharing space and experiences that root you in your own body and connect you to other bodies, and none of this can exist in cyberspace. Or rather, none of it can exist only in cyberspace. I have to put my phone down sometimes and be with people, even if it means sacrificing potential online connections.
And I also have to allow myself the space to make things, because making art is the other thing it's all about. Connection and art feed every part of me, spiritual and physical and emotional and mental and creative and, when I'm very lucky, even financial, and that's why it's absurd that I've only written one new poem in the past year. Not even a very good one. I keep my brain so full and noisy and distracted that there's no way for it to do anything but dissociate. Creating anything worthwhile demands being ruthlessly present and focused, so that's the state I have to start chasing again. Thus, slow living. I'm going to bake bread and learn to roller skate and figure out the tarot cards I got for Christmas (this deck, if you're curious), and in between those things, I'm going to practice being quiet and still and allowing my brain to do its own thing, even though that's terrifying. And I'm going to balance all of this with also trying to get out of my head and into my body sometimes, equally as terrifying and with a lot of trigger potential, but necessary, I think. I have a tendency to intellectualize everything and refuse to feel it, because feeling is overwhelming and stressful and makes me feel not in control. Maybe being less controlled is part of the goal, but in ways that are safe and healthy rather than reckless and destructive.
I would love to know what it's all about for those of you reading this, if you're comfortable sharing. What is the purpose of life? Why do you think you're here? And are you doing things that feed that purpose, whatever it is? Are there small steps you might take toward that goal, if you're like me and have become a master of avoidance? This is not so much motivational as it is me begging you to get in these trenches with me so I'm not alone. It's probably better down here, right?
Right.