Into the world I go, with my pages.
some thoughts on curiosity, creativity, and inconvenience.
It took me a long time to understand that not everything I publish needs to be fit for The New Yorker or The Paris Review. I’m flattering myself a bit there I suppose, because I’m not sure if anything I’ve published here thus far is fit for either, but that certainly doesn’t stop me from subjecting everything I post to this platform to the same editorial scrutiny. It took me even longer to understand that I don’t ever really need to explain myself as it pertains to my presence on the internet. This is a leftover reflex from childhood adversity solidified by a lifetime of being a woman, where I internalized the need to continually justify my existence whenever anyone paid attention to me. As if existing alone weren’t enough.
Perhaps it was the musical and lyrical atrocity that is Miss Swift’s latest album that emboldened me and prompted a much-needed shift in perspective, but an important lesson has finally begun to sink in: there are thousands of people bravely putting themselves “out there” every day, many of them far less qualified, talented, and significantly less self-aware than myself. With that in mind, very little should stop me from publishing and posting and creating whatever my heart desires.
I’ve been slowly decoupling from my previous career as a marketing strategist (just typing that gave me the ick, so I’m sorry if it also gave you the ick), meaning I am trying to approach everything I do from an intentionally un-strategic point of view. I feel a certain sadness when I think about how wildly creative and prolific I was in my late teens and early twenties, at the height of platforms like Tumblr and Blogspot. When I revisit those archives or read through my old journals, I am struck by the maturity, intelligence, and talent I carried but didn’t seem to believe I had. As I grow older and technology advances, I can’t help but feel like I am moving backwards — my talents and creativity atrophying as everything becomes more convenient, efficient, and strategic. I touched on this phenomenon last year when I wrote about the importance of engaging with the physical world, quoting Kurt Vonnegut and his famous quote about envelopes and farting around.1
I can pinpoint the moment I stopped having fun on social platforms like Instagram. It was in college right after Trump was elected in 2016, and it coincided with the onslaught of updated algorithms and the collective silent agreement to treat the platform as a marketing tool. I adopted this approach and unknowingly entered what would become one of the most tumultuous relationships of my life thus far: my relationship with my online identity, and its subsequent conflation with my worth as a human being. I wasn’t posting for fun anymore. Everything had to have a purpose, convey something, do something. It became even more pre-meditated than it was before, and this mentality crept into every area of life. I’m not using hyperbole when I say that I genuinely haven’t enjoyed using Instagram since then, nearly a decade ago. I owe it to myself to ask why I feel the need to continue voluntarily subjecting myself to generally feeling icky when I have the choice to just not, and why I keep expecting something to change when it’s only become exponentially worse.
While it isn’t always possible due to capitalism and our uniquely dystopian age, I try to opt for the less convenient route when possible. I love public transportation because it allows me to read and observe. I bought a bike with some birthday money I got from my grandparents and have been pedaling around my city. I prefer to call the restaurant directly when ordering takeout, picking it up myself instead of using an app (it’s cheaper that way, anyway). I’m making the intentional choice to watch movies instead of resorting to television. I’m trying to become a regular at my local diner, sitting at the counter and savoring my coffee and pie. I never leave the house without a book and my notebook, so when I find myself waiting in line or with some time to spare, I reach for them instead of my phone. I force myself to engage in the painful awkwardness of small talk with strangers when I have the mental bandwidth to, and to tolerate the unavoidable discomfort of being perceived. I am, in a way, trying to turn back time for myself to return to the state of mind and set of conditions that enabled me to create like I did when I was young.
As I sink deeper into the autumn and winter months I love so much, I am also sinking deeper into a new reality I’ve created: soon I will be done with school and will have my associate number. Soon, I get to make a living doing something I love so much, and didn’t even know I could love so much. I don’t need to exist on the internet in the ways I did before, the ways that were so normalized and without interrogation one might think they had been written into legislation. I don’t need to optimize and monetize and build. I can just be, and share what I love, and continue following the curious and unpredictable tug of inspiration when I feel it — just as I did before all of this.
And so, to quote Vonnegut for the umpteenth time, “[i]nto the world I go, with my pages. And what a figure I am.”
That particular story starts around minute 24.