The question “how are you” has been an increasingly tricky one, often requiring one to reply using good-natured lies. I’m never sure if things are moving forwards or backwards. I feel compelled to hoard all my emotional reserves as reinforcements for a rainy day. Dreams and plans sitting on the shelf are stolen, absorbed into the murky darkness of uncertainty. When I tell people how I’ve been doing, I recite a tired script, then think to myself, ‘but is anyone actually not stagnating, and just having a good time?’ I also know that question is my own rhetorical device, a shield against confronting a point of eventuality I’m not prepared to give a report on. But today I might take a stab at this.
In a fit of ennui late last night I decided to check my Medium account for the first time in a long time, only to discover that I have 17 drafts of different articles/blogposts I’ve put on the backburner. Seventeen. I wonder what else is lodged in this deep abyss of forgetting.
The topics in these drafts range from things like critical nutrition studies and queer aesthetics, to music reviews and personal anecdotes (aka the old-fashioned blog post). Some of these actually turned out better than what I remember writing at the time; most need work. But they’ve been tucked away for so many months none of them really feel current now. I have to update my references and do some psychological stocktaking before I can even consider posting them.
There is a reason I never got around to finishing and uploading them. I’m not sure I feel comfortable posting stuff on the internet anymore, especially my own writing. Social media feels like a deluge that is impossible to swim against, totally unmanageable. There’s also a lack of grace in social media etiquette that raises its own panoptic conditions, in turn creating a kind of hypervigilance that dampens candidness, provocations and stone-faced sarcasm.
It’s also become clear to me how much I really don’t enjoy this one thing integral to showing signs of life on the internet, which has now traversed into the real: texting. By this I don’t necessarily mean texting per se (I appreciate its convenience and relative unintrusiveness), but in the defaulting to it as a primary mode of communication instead of utilising it as a contingency, a mere option. This is something I seriously struggle with! Long text chains/convos stress me out and sometimes feel like torture. Thinkpieces on Instagram stories make my eyes hurt.
I guess this is what the pandemic has got me to palpably reckon with. Replying to one text message at a time to keep abreast of your friends is more demanding than showing up to a physical event and catching up with 20 different people all at once. Of course, this might just be my own differentiated experience. I’m just trying to put it all together to figure out why socialising through the internet has been so difficult and unsatisfying.
What I can say is this: keeping up with text messages during this time feels even more like a balancing act than before, because of the sheer fact that there are just more of them to deal with. Having to select the handful of people you get to spend time with IRL, each time a social event is planned, feels a bit like being a judge in a reality TV show resorting to a process of elimination, because those are the rules of this game.
I really hate to be one to catastrophise — surely these aren’t singular experiences unique to me. However, I keep finding my own voice unrecognisable as I communicate with my friends, who feel more and more remote. The act of communicating these days reminds me of using babytalk to coax and placate an infant who is still distinguishing unintelligible noises into a coherent pattern. Words lose their power; sentences grow shorter. Amplification becomes repetition, and not a matter of auditory volume. It’s as if everyone is encased in a layer of cellophane, distorting lines of sight, casting doubt on every intention.
These days I remind myself that some exertions are futile, especially through a medium that isn’t democratic and untrammeled, like the way fresh air, free from pollution, is meant to be a public good. There are architects and engineers who have designed this virtual habitat, harvesting our secrets and innermost convictions for money to install more puppet strings, more trapdoors to buckets of crabs. Maybe it’s time to touch the grass outside.
I want to remember what I sound like.
