Being Social (Redux / Reflux)
While Twitter has brought me some amazing opportunities and a number of lifelong friends, the feeling that I have, as Bob Dylan once said, “stayed in Mississippi a day too long,” is omnipresent; now, whenever I ascribe to Twitter any purpose beyond a method by which to broadcast these meandering status updates into the ambient, it’s usually indicative of a fear of the laborious pace of the WIP and of being forgotten, itself one of the many masks worn by the fear of moving forward.
And so – as is the pattern – I come up with a plan (so many plans) to feed this snarling fear beast of my own creation: I share links and useless parentheticals and dog pictures (though those still live on my private Instagram; one must, after all, share dog pictures) in an attempt to, as Stephen Colbert once said of Cookie Monster, binge and purge at the same time – usually under the pretense that I should come up with a way to effectively share links for newsletter readers because clearly this is a problem that must be solved instead of the innumerable ones plaguing the WIP – and I fall back into a decade-long (jesusfuckingchrist), self-perpertuated pattern of both a perceived obligation to deliver inaccurate reflections of myself and the stifling swirl of relative mind before resolving anew to commit fully to my heartlandic hermitage, writing and broadcasting these Informalities (the point of which was recently explored and reaffirmed here) whenever they emerge from the mind-muck; it is usually at this point that I can feel the flatulent elephant abandon its perch upon my shoulders and fly off to parts unknown. And I can breathe.
In those moments when my psychological vigilance wanes and self-doubt invades and takes root, I allow it, social media —and Twitter, especially — to create a fiction that I am more than an ambient mosquito (to my fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the 24% of the population who actually use Twitter and the 46% of that 24% that use it daily) and, when those (extremely) rare moments of reaching further than the ambient come, I crave more; whoever called it a slot machine was dead-on: time vanishes and all that matters is the pull of the lever and the ding of the bell, an addictive opiate to palliate the fear of being forgotten.
Tom Petty once said, “I just don’t want to do anything that I can’t feel like I’m doing honestly”: pulling that lever simply isn’t an honest expression of where I want to be or what I want to write outside the bounds of the primary work; it’s a step backwards into learned addiction and the invasive tendrils of self-doubt and fear of the unknown. I’m far happier tending to my little garden here, writing what I want to write on a platform of my own – these Informalities, the newsletter, and, most importantly, the WIP – and throwing the results into the world without expectation, moving forward into whatever lies ahead – though I will always have dog pictures to share.
