Breaks in the pattern
Organic reality, looking outside of set definitions, Instagram as an experiment
Full moon transmission - harvest moon
Yesterday, I made a post on Instagram saying I was unfollowing everyone. My partner was the first person I unfollowed, which left me with a sense of sadness. I walked to meet him in downtown San Diego after his flight came in, told him this, and then refollowed him.
On Instagram, Yaya Erin Rivera wrote, “I took a month’s break from social media in order to know my own thoughts more clearly, and had a big soul retrieval experience as a result. I did not announce this break, as somehow that occurs to me as feeding a paradigm of compulsory social media use, an obligation that to me affirms IG as baseline reality and I need it to be a place I come when it feels good to and leave when it doesn’t. I remain allegiant to organic reality.”
When I was a teenager, my physical reality was very slow. Without a cell phone, tv, or consistent access to a computer, I passed a lot of time looking around, reading, journaling, or being in my own head. At that time, my computer time was mainly contained to an hour on the single-use family laptop that was in the kitchen. Sometimes, in my high school library, I would browse Tumblr and follow whatever blogs seemed to meet my aesthetic tastes in even the slightest way.
Now I look back and see, I, like all teenagers, was developing my taste and voice through processing these images. I was interested in understanding myself. The images I reblogged contained archetypes and symbols. I was identifying patterns of interest in myself, and desired personality traits and life circumstances. I lived in a small town outside of Montréal, where there was one bar that both the former high school students and current teachers went to every Friday night. I wanted more outputs than the ones before me, and was desperate to find some creative or emotional threads I could follow. Collecting images online wasn’t an empty activity. It was a rich process of developing an aesthetic taste.
A couple of years into this process of image collecting, I began to copy passages from my journals and share them, raw and unedited, onto Tumblr. At first no one saw these, and then, with time, some attention came. Through this sharing, I began to be seen for the depths of my feelings and my innermost thoughts that I did not yet share with my friends or my then-boyfriend. This was not a voice I felt safe to express with those around me, but sharing it through a screen allowed me to express my innermost self with myself without having to attach it to my physical reality.
At 16, I was deeply entrenched in my people pleasing tendencies. They helped me survive. When I did speak up, I was met with punishment, and this created a pattern of feeling immense fear to share myself. I wanted love and didn’t think I deserved it by being myself. I suffered for speaking to the abuse I saw, and this buried my opinions deep inside of myself. I began to see myself as shy. I developed this into a personality trait, and thought this was innately how I was. But my poems were deeply emotional and spoke confidently. In them, I expressed my depression and how trapped and alone I felt. I typed, didn’t edit what I wrote, and only attached myself in my day-to-day life to the truth of what I had written as much as I could handle. Sometimes it felt like someone else had written the words on the screen. The poems didn’t have to lie.
Now, as I grapple with social media and how it distracts me and distorts my attention, I also see the positive aspects of it. The seemingly empty activity of reblogging images on Tumblr as a teenager helped expand my world beyond my physical location. It provided an escape. Sharing my art and poetry gave me a platform in which to be heard, to connect, and to recognize that there was possibility beyond the ones I saw in people before me.
But I’m 30 now, and I don’t feel as lost and alienated from everyone, or myself. I have expanded beyond only sharing my work online to first working through the topics of my poems with friends and loved ones, writing this newsletter, and performing. I don’t need, or want, social media to be the primary place I share myself. I see the way Instagram occupies and demands my attention, and how this sometimes distracts me from doing my work as deeply as I want to. Still, Yaya Erin Riveria’s words feel the most resonant to me. “I remain allegiant to organic reality,” she wrote. Her words erase the dichotomy of all or nothing around, and instead, create a space for more authentic, nuanced relating.
This pull away from social media feels less these apps, and more about a shifting season of life. Since the summer, I have been highly external–promoting a book I wrote over the last five years, and reliving the arc of the last years of my twenties in front of an audience, then having conversations with strangers. It demands a lot of my energy, and is both gratifying and draining. For months, I have wanted to be very open and allow in a lot of inputs. After graduating in May, I wanted to go out constantly and be hyper social. Before that, for a number of reasons, I had been in a long season of inwardness. This season extended long enough that I thought I was “done with the period of my life” where I went out and was very social. I thought I was Changed, and a different person.
Of course, I was–in the way we all are always changing–and I also wasn’t–in the way that we do not become new people entirely, but deepen into ourselves by shedding and shifting through experience. It is funny how attached one can get to a season, and treat a current state or feeling as empirical evidence of How One Is. Funny, and yet, deeply harmful at times and limiting. We fix ourselves into boxes. We believe our lives are over and we can’t change. We get so attached to seasons that we keep ourselves in them even when we desire something new.
Now, again, I feel a pull to go inward. I want to curate what I take in, to shrink my inputs, and spend more time in silence and in the quiet company of good friends. But I am not seeing this as a sign that this is because a part of myself is gone. I am not continuing the narrative that I am growing older, and thus, the time in my life in which I played shows, went out, and wanted to be in bars is done. We are always changing. The last band I played in could be the last one I ever am in, and yet, I am doing myself more harm than good if I try to adhere to strict definitions of a self. I am trapping myself in the illusion of a fixed identity, and I want to be freed.
There is a poem in my new book, The Snakes Came Back, that I wrote when going through a breakup that dragged on long past the time when the words were said.
CLEAN SLATE
Rain has been droning all day.
Endless pouring, and I keep writing
the same words: I’m alone again—
as if they’ll jump from the page, grow a mouth.
I want to delete my social media until January,
dive into the new year with a clean slate.
But there’s no need for a cryptic post before
doing so, the final wave from the boat’s edge.
The old dog is pacing in the kitchen.
He crashes into tables, gets stuck in the table’s legs.
In my arms he’s all bones and my mom says,
What do you want me to do? He wants to live.
as the rain bleats on.
I knew then, as I remember now, that I don’t need to declare everything to everyone. I don’t need to support Instagram use as a baseline. I do appreciate people who share about their social media use because I think the struggle is insidious and all too normalized. There are too many large-held beliefs that to be an artist one has to be online; that you will be forgotten if you are not; that those with online followings are the ones creating the best work.
But I can also allow myself to be in the seasons of my life, and to follow my whims. I can live in “organic reality,” and trust that this reality will, and is always, shifting. I can see becoming as a process of experimentation, rather than a rush to the finish line to Know Myself.
I am less interested in set definitions, and more interested in deepening my curiosity. If Instagram is ultimately a flattening tool, how can I use it with creativity? How can I recognize the ways it helps me share myself, and also deepens my own tastes, while also recalibrating my relationship to it when it feels over-steeped in distraction? How can I find ways to pull away when I feel like it, without telling myself that it, or anything, has to be final? How can I not get trapped in seeing any piece of my life as a fixed reality? How can my consistently shifting relationship to an app allow me to practice being in uncertainty and change, and trusting my own whims? How can I acknowledge my capacity a bit more, and allow this acknowledgment to deepen my relationship to self and knowing what feels authentic to me?
How can I be in organic reality?
I can walk with my boyfriend. I can go camping for a few days with a friend. I can focus on making work which requires my attention and time in elongated ways, and resists being contained in bite sized photographs. I can pull away, spend time in silence, and come back if and when it feels good. I can attune to the seasons of my life and environment. I can experiment with what feels good, and look at my own life with curiosity. I can follow my whims and be rocked by change. I can rock with it.
Tonight I perform at MCASD, La Jolla with Matty Terrones. Last San Diego show for awhile. Free tickets with the code “SNAKESRELEASE” when you check out. The performance is at 6 pm prompt.
Tomorrow I perform in LA at Heavy Manners with Matty. Tickets here. This will be my last show for awhile.
My book, The Snakes Came Back, is out in the world. You can purchase physical books directly on the publisher’s website. If you want to get the book in your library or bookstore, and they don’t already carry us, ask them if they could order the book for you! @asterism_books (USA) @antennebooks (UK/Europe) @utp_distribution @ampersandinc (Canada) can help them out.
I enjoyed this podcast episode by Moonbeaming on Shadow Archetypes. It was a guide in identifying my own shadow, and how they have both positively impacted me and harmed me.
I also enjoyed this interview with filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, where he spoke about no longer identifying with revenge, art as a spiritual path, art and ego, and more.
Until next time,
Lora
I hope you get time to look up at the moon as it moves towards darkness, and you think about what you felt today on this full moon. I hope you can recognise growth, and that it strengthens your appetite.