write me well

Tag: adapting

  • De-gramming

    I have been on the internet since about age eight. My first distinct memories of it take place in Costa Mesa, California, logging onto America Online from my dad’s office computer and playing Scrambler in AOL chat rooms. The only thing people asked you for was your A/S/L (a little horrifying in retrospect, but 1997 was a different time – or, at least, it certainly felt like it) and all that mattered was how quickly you could reArRanGe a bUncH oF leTtErS. There wasn’t a lot of creativity involved beyond inventing my first screen name, but one thing was for sure: the more of the internet I experienced, the more I absolutely loved it.

    Designing my first Geocities website on the family PC and using it as an online portfolio for my would-be novels (so many would-be novels). Graduating to having my own PC, in my own bedroom, where I lived my best life on Neopets and built out websites for my Redwall-themed RPG guild and personalized my pet’s pages with pastel hex codes and a healthy dose of Comic Sans. When Myspace arrived on the scene, I dove right in, coding and curating my profile page down to the <p>’s, because why wouldn’t I? A shiny new place to express myself while forcing people to listen to the dulcet tones of Rivers Cuomo as they scrolled through my About Me section? My friends, the absolute dream.

    For the most part, in the intervening years from those eclectic little slices of the web right up through recent times, I still have mostly loved the internet. As someone with almost exclusively long-distance friendships, the internet was an integral part of my early adulthood – the whole humanity-changing access to an endless stream of information part notwithstanding. From Sacramento to Norwich, San Diego to Santa Ana, San Jose to London, the existence of the internet and the prevalence of its offspring social media made my twenties possible. 

    This was, it feels important to note, before social media was so obviously commodified, when the groundwork and data collection for that commodification was still being meticulously laid and covertly hoarded. I saw my various profiles as easier ways to stay in touch with the world. Rather than updating a website or a blog, I could just have a social media account. It meant less writing, but what started out as a con of these accounts quickly became a very clear perk: their convenience, which only ever increased as more app updates arrived, was unmatched. Social media took a multi-step process that often involved several creative decisions (posts are serious business) and more than one session of staring at a blank Word document for thirty-plus minutes and reduced it to, at its simplest, three clicks or taps, from posting to posted. 

    The result of that aesthetically-pleasing convenience? The last 12 years of my life as documented online on my Instagram, and up until about 2019, on my Facebook as well.  

    Now at this point, well into 2024, Instagram has been a highly profitable marketing tool for many years. I am not naive, and this is not new information. But it’s been either enjoyably so (I do love pretty things and do not mind them being advertised to me) or easily avoidable, so it’s never stopped me from using it.

    As I continued to scroll, there were obvious advertisements. Then there were slickly sponsored posts. And then there were so very many attempts to make Instagram into TikTok through reels and search page updates. Still, in-between all of that, there remained photos of my old friend’s sprouting spring garden, stories from another’s trip to Vietnam with her family, posts with another’s job announcement or their walk to work or their latest curbside find. They all came together to make Instagram worthwhile. The good always outweighed the bad.   

    Then, about two weeks ago, I tapped the search icon so I could look up a specific account…and something new happened. Where previously a harmless magnifying glass had sat, a blueish non-M now swooshed and swirled. When I typed in my search query, I suddenly found myself not in a sea of near-match account names (because I can never remember how to correctly spell usernames), but in conversation with a robot.

    Instagram had replaced basic search with Meta AI. That was my last straw. 

    I could handle the ads. I had managed my impulsive purchase habits and made my account private when I got tired (so tired) of blocking porn bots. I gave up on ever being able to afford the suggested content because the algorithm, smart as it was, never picked up on the fact that this gal cannot afford a $348 chartreuse dress (as much as she desperately would love to). The invasion of something that I have struggled to get behind since its inception, that has been nothing short of pervasive in every section of the web and its online watercoolers, was too much.  

    All I want from Instagram is to share my life and see my friends’ lives. Meta AI had no place in that purpose, no business in my search bar. Seeing it there, realizing how little choice I had in this social media app with which I was daily choosing to engage, made me sit back and really reassess my online presence for the first time since, well…quite possibly, since 1997.  

    I still haven’t fully decided how I’m going to portion off my use of Instagram. There is no alternative to replace such a widely used way to stay in touch with the wonderful humans I’ve met across my many jobs and even more many moves. Right now, it would feel like a real loss if I just shut it down and stopped participating.  

    But what I can change about Instagram is my own intentionality. After a lot of thinking about what that might look like, I arrived here, at the dusty old URL that I have on autopay and so continue to accidentally pay for and might as well use. Instagram will remain a place where I go to find others. But I am going to try and make my own Instagram simply a jumping off point for here, where I am investing in my own little space on the internet. I have downloaded all my photos from my Instagram account in case it disappears off the face of the planet tomorrow, and I’m going to try and be more intentional about what I upload. Ideally, most of it will land here instead.   

    The truth is, I am aware very few people end up on this website. I often joke that I don’t have a readership and that I’m just writing for myself. But what is also true, and I also say every time, is that I don’t really mind. I enjoy having a website for the same reasons I enjoyed having a five-colored room in high school, for the same reasons I enjoy getting tattoos, for the same reasons I enjoy decorating our home. It’s a form of self-expression that I really value and have valued for twenty-seven years. Sure, this is a bit more involved than typing my A/S/L into a chatroom and playing internet Boggle, and maybe it’s a bit weird that I’m sending this self-expression out into the void for pretty much any human to read. But I get to pick the bits I share, sharing those bits makes me happy, and honestly – who doesn’t just love a pretty thing? 

    How we connect with the internet and with social media is one of the many unforeseen challenges modern humans have been blessed with confronting, and frankly, it sucks. I am so over Facebook it hurts, but I can’t delete my account because I’ve been seduced by Facebook Marketplace. I just wrote an entire post about grappling with the trials and tribulations of Instagram, involving many thoughts and initiatives, none of which involve deleting that account either. Even my Tumblr, derelict since 2018, I hang on to – although that one is more like a very specific shrine to the years I spent alone in my twenties, and less a place I actively spend time.  

    The internet, for better or worse, is currently inextricable from this millennial. Time to at least try and make it for the better.  

  • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

    It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

    How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

    I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

    On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

    Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

    So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

    Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

    I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

    And then, we have COVID.

    When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

    Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

    Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

    Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

    Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

    So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

    Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

    And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.