I can't get enough of spring. Dandelion fluff floats in the grass-sweetened air. I almost inhale it. I like the thought of the dandelion particles being part of me.
I want light, depth, the divine. I want to merge with beauty. I want to drink the world in one great gulp, feel it soften and tingle inside me. I imagine this is what sex must feel like, taking someone into your body, being one skin.
"Social media isn’t a cheap and inadequate facsimile of social life; it’s its exact opposite. It isn’t worse than social life at fostering personal connection, it undoes personal connection and reverses our social skills.
This is because social media doesn’t really allow you to interact with people. People are living beings with beating hearts and live emotions. Social life has always been about engaging in the immediate physical presence of such beings. Social media avoids exactly that part, while allowing you to exchange information and symbols of approval."
The shift in my soul after leaving Instagram and almost all algorithmic social media has been profound. I don't think I realized the depth of the damage those spaces did to my mind and spirit until I walked away from them.
Unfortunately, this podcast has not brought the best people into my life. I tried for many years to meaningfully engage, to connect, to make contact with others. I showed up as a genuine, caring, reliable, consistent, and thoughtful human being. I tried to be a friend. Most of the time, I did not receive that in return.
Encountering very hurtful and thoughtless treatment after my mother's death was the final straw, as they say. I left Instagram, and I will continue to stay away.
I focus on the podcast itself, my patreon, and Letterboxd. I'm more protected now, more detached and wary of people. I never wanted to be this way, but I can no longer afford to be as accessible and open as I once was. I guess it was never really safe to be like that.
I regret the years I wasted on social media, posting for a phantom audience of people who couldn't even show support as I navigated the worst time of my life. It's all meaningless and empty. People are addicted to it, though. They are hypnotized by the nonsense on these platforms, preferring spectatorship and parasociality to true connection.
I'm a nobody online. No one listens to me. Few care about what I share. I suspect my looks play a part in it, but who knows. So be it. I am tired of caring. My voice is small and insignificant, but it is mine. I am a real person. I am flesh and blood. I will not let this algorithmic age take away my soul.
I will not conform. I will not play the game. I wouldn't win it anyway. Women like me cannot be contained by these shallow spaces. In my episode about Kiki's Delivery Service, I said that I am more than this world can comprehend, and I stand by those words. Nothing will diminish me.
"Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"
— Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods
"Pipe" by Sega Bodega with Vashti Bunyan