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simplerperfectionist · 5 years

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Day 1

Today is the first day of an extended social media break which I have chosen to embark on in an attempt to break my addiction, foster my relationship with myself, develop and deepen my focus, clarify my own intellectual and artistic voice, and hopefully vanquish that little goblin that sits in my head and watches me all the time from the projected viewpoint of others. You know that Atwood quote about every woman being a man inside a woman watching herself? I feel like that all the time. She’s nodding to the way in which the internal voyeur is used as a weapon of the patriarchy to get women to subject themselves, and I do feel that in a gendered way sometimes but I also experience it in a more general way, that whatever various audiences I perceive myself to have live constantly inside my head and I am performing for them at all times, even in my thought exercises. Which I suppose is because those audiences only exist within my head. Yes, there are people that follow me on various platforms or friends who consume my #content, but the panel of people that I feel are always watching me and measuring me are simply my own inner critics projected out through these platforms onto the vague digital presences of my friends and acquaintances and a smattering of strangers. Anyway, all of that is to say that my overuse of digitized self publicity has been making me feel like a madwoman and has been actively rewiring the way that my thoughts form and unnecessarily activating my stress responses for, well, honestly probably for years, but most notably for the past year or two.

Lately one of my favorite fantasies is to acquire whatever sum of spare money it will cost me to hire a tech nerd to scour the internet for all of the profiles and accounts and email lists that I have long since forgotten and abandoned which they/I/we can then scrub, delete, and bury. I feel like none of us listened when people were like “whatever you put on the internet exists forever.” I shouldn’t speak for other people. I never listened. It didn’t feel like a big deal! I was a kid and I wanted to know things, and express myself, and keep up with my friends. I didn’t know that it would one day rather haunt me to feel relics of my earlier selves floating about in the ether, available to anyone even remotely more computer savvy than myself. Anyway THAT’S a fun paranoia I generally avoid thinking about for longer than 30 seconds at a time. In truth, I don’t think it matters that much. I mean I can pretty easily freak myself out about it if I think about like A.I. or like dystopian government conspiracies or even the possibility that I could ever end up being someone in a position of notable influence that might motivate people to fuck with me... BUT if I avoid those dark rabbit holes, it really doesn’t matter. What are people gonna do with my old 8tracks playlists? With an etsy shop I forgot about? They’re ghosts of my former selves and dried out seeds of old timeline potentials. Lol.

God, I shouldn’t have mentioned A.I. because now I’m stuck thinking about how you cannot confirm the interiority of anyone at all in the world save for yourself and subsequently I truly could be the only human being in a world of A.I. and I wouldn’t know. A fun secret is that I have become a truly deeply paranoid person over the past several years and sometimes I freak even myself out with how unhinged I can sound, but I generally handle it pretty well and surrender myself to the knowledge that I don’t know much about the nature of reality, nor do I need to, and whatever thoughts I run with are simply thoughts and are quite harmless. If you’re reading this please do not involuntarily commit me lmao.

Okay the irony of documenting this journey digitally online, specifically on a social media platform, and writing to a nonexistent but theoretically eventually existent audience is NOT lost on me. There’s something comforting about it though. Honestly, I’ve always thought that about writing on tumblr. I used to have a locked blog that was a digital diary of sorts though I believe I’ve since deleted it. There’s something about the blue background I feel like. It’s like writing a letter and sending it out to sea. I guess it’s also the anonymity of the platform. I know a few users on here, but generally I know nothing save that there are other users and I know some of their interests. This feels like a way to be seen without being seen at all. Like talking to the stars at night. Anyway I suppose I could write in my journal instead, but I like the act of typing, and I do have a vague sense that I may someday share this. Also I do think this is helping to ease the withdrawal from the public platforms, which is actually probably the only reason I’m using it.

Enough musings, here’s the nitty gritty of the update: I've deleted Instagram and Twitter from my phone. I don't remember my logins for them so it's a fairly effective barrier in that there are a variety of steps I would need to go through in order to get back on. Twitter auto logged out on my laptop so there's a similar barrier there. I've yet to log out of insta on my laptop but I suppose I should do that as well. I've rearranged the apps on my phone and I suspect I will another 8 or so times as my relationship to the device changes. I desperately want to throw it away and get something simpler, but I’m still too tied to it at the moment. I really want to be free of it. I hate my stupid phone. I want to not feel like I’ll die without it, like I’ll start living on another planet. Honestly? I probably will! And that would be good for me. But I can’t shake the feeling that something bad would happen if I did, that if I stopped looking at everything happening out in the “world,” if I stopped observing what all of these people I’ve labeled as friends are doing, then I, what? Would lose touch with reality? Would become too different from them? Might dare to be happy in this chaotic time on earth?

I actually know exactly what unplugging fully would do. At first I’ll have to go through withdrawals, but once I make it through, the noise in my head will quiet, the sense of being watched will severely diminish if not die, I will become deeply grounded and present in my own surroundings, observing them honestly from my own perspective rather than filtering them through learned lenses, I will stop questioning my own artistic and intellectual worth, instead trusting myself because I will become my primary resource of knowledge and creation and discernment, I will invest more deeply in the relationships that exist in my physical reality and the distant relationships in which I and the other are equally invested in maintaining as I’ll no longer have the illusion of relationships that subsist on passive observance and occasional expressions of support via likes/comments/reacts. I don’t know WHY I’m afraid of that!!!! That’s what I want!!! I want friendships based on time spent together, I want letters exchanged, post cards, phone calls, I don’t want impersonal pictures of peoples’ lunch orders or concert videos. I don’t want to be known that way and I don’t want others to know me that way. I don’t want to meaninglessly keep tabs on people, I want the magic of wondering about them for months or years and randomly encountering them. I want to live in a world of magic. I DO live in a world of magic, I want to clear enough space to let it work.

I fell into musing again lol. The rest of the update is that I still have facebook but I never check it. I’m keeping tumblr for now because it’s still useful to me in various ways. I have snapchat as well, but I only really use it for two group chats. I still have costar, venmo, and spotify but I rarely use the social aspects of them. I need to purge my email, but that’s not a job for today. I also need to end some subscriptions which is less about social media but they still feel like digital ties. I thought nextdoor would be a good form of plugging into the local buzz, but it’s honestly just annoying so I need to get off of that too. I’m planning to start reading the local papers and avoiding all other news. Hopefully this will guide me towards community engagement and local politics instead of 24 hr national outrage. Oh I’m also still listening to podcasts if that counts, which I feel like it does. Okay! Well,

Signing off until next time,

This has been E. G.

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