Losing Yourself in the Digital Age (Patreon)

I wrote this text a couple nights ago when I found the source of this lingering feeling of lack of fulfillment. As I'm reviewing it again and about to post, it's a Saturday night and after a lot of thinking the past ... 3 weeks or some shit, I find that all I really want is to make a difference in someone's life. Inspired by one of my favorite human creatures I was able to really grasp for the first time what I've been missing for ages. Anyway, it's 10PM now, I have a good two hours before anybody even thinks about going to sleep so I can attempt to film something and I'm going to take a leap of faith and share something I consider very intimate to me - my midnight thoughts. 

I can only hope this will be received as I've intended it and that someone understands. 

No sooner do you start living for other people than when you never got the chance to establish a sense of self, to figure out who you are in the midst of myriads of information and constantly beaten by the tidal waves of expendable entertainment.

If you find a penny and you don't post it online, did it really happen? 

I feel the overwhelming need to return to myself and establish a boundary of myself as an entity separate from the digital world because I've become consumed by it and I didn't even know. My mother warned me of this, though like all her warnings, the intention was not to save me from impending doom, but to get me to comply and never leave her in favor of living my own life.

What does it take to live for myself? How does one accomplish such a thing? I've been asking myself that for countless nights. Abstinence may be the answer for some, but that never quite cut it for me. I can't remember the last time I haven't been connected. Many years ago for sure. At that time, the alternative was to imprison myself in this gruesome bear pit of doom people around me called "reality". At that time, the digital world was just the tonic I needed to discover new possibilities and pull myself out of the pit I thought I was destined to die in - sooner rather than later, I hoped - because people around me made damn sure that I stayed right where I was, whether subtly by demonizing anything that gave me hope and reminding me that the only person I could ever trust was my abuser, or rather overtly by convincing me that I would fail at anything I could ever set out, there was no place in the world for what I cared about, and everything I had to give was utterly and totally worthless - therefore, I should just conform and become who they want me to be if I wanted any chance at some semblance of a life that they didn't deem equal to a shameful, hideous disgrace. Those people I connected with, they said, were a waste of time - and I'd be best off cutting them out. 

Today there's no such thing as a shortage of people who want to connect with me. Though, at all times, I feel a certain level of impostor syndrome - because most people in the digital world don't see or hear or receive me any more than the people in reality did - and I essentially traded one loneliness for another. The only viable remedy is to say more, show more, share more... with validation in the form of likes and responses being our life support. But the only thing that's different from ten or twenty years ago is that now we pretend to know one another, misled by a regular flow of another person's face - and thoughts, but mostly face - across our dashboard into believing they are part of our lives, or even that they are who we assume them to be. We used to connect with people online because they were able to give us the understanding we so lacked but desperately needed from people in reality - and now we have brought our nightmare into our safe space. The strangers behind the screen now judge, misjudge, use, abuse, misunderstand, misinterpret, project, label, treat and mistreat you the same way real life people did, way back when. We've created the same hell we tried to escape, only with greater exposure. Worse even! In real life people forgive and forget (eventually) - but since the internet doesn't forget, why should anyone forgive? Anything you say and do will be used against you until the end of time - and anyone who has ever experienced this torture knows the feeling that the end of one's time can't come soon enough. 

Before you know it, your integrity and personality are washed away in the ocean of useless status updates, repetitive selfies, clickbait cash grubb trash videos and flimmering advertisements that follow you around wherever you may go like predatory wolves disguised as Mary's lamb and if you squint just enough I swear you can see them popping in and out of existence as though embossing their imprint on the back of your brain while they redirect you from your intended course of action and rob you for everything you own - your soul (and sometimes your bank account). Before you know it, you are consumed by the overabundance of available information that you soak in through every part of you the hypnotic blue light shines on - and you don't even notice you're lost. 

You're lost because you don't know where you're going and you came here to find your path and every one of about three billion people claim to know the way - and it isn't until a decade goes by and you feel just as lost as before you started that you begin to see what you've gotten yourself into. The distress inside you grows to be unbearable and you don't notice how, the more information you consume, the more insatiable you feel... Deep inside you know you've gone off course but by now you are fighting for people to remember you, that you don't disappear from their awareness entirely, washed away in the ocean of useless status updates, repetitive selfies, clickbait cash grubb trash videos and flimmering advertisements. By now, your survival in the real world depends on it. 

And so does everyone else's. 

By now, we are all living for everyone but ourselves - seeking validation whether through our own little helpful contributions or through the abuse of someone else behind the screen that we forgot is a person with a soul just like ourselves. By now, everything is so overwhelming that we've exhausted our capacity to care. 

Who are you when you shut down your computer, switch off the phone - and what happens to that person when you just never do? 

Do you notice your heart beating? Or is your entire world black text in a white box?

Is anything not in that white box even real?

That person has been calling me but I never picked up. In fact, I muted her until all I could hear was the subtle rattling of my laptop's cooler and the high pitched hissing of the static inside my own head. I feel like I've stopped time for the past ten years because I stopped existing in the real world. Only the digital version of me was surviving and stumbling about the vastness of the data junkyard we all navigate each day. Now, I need to call her back and hope she will pick up. 

This is by no means to say that I'll disappear off of the internet or go on a "social media detox" (apparently that's a thing I'm not making this up) - Simply that a shift is happening inside me and I'm developing an awareness of who I am as a person. I assume this is healing because it would make sense that this would be how healing works. 

The past three or so weeks I've been very withdrawn. My depression robbed me of all my energy to the point where even talking to anyone except Jack became just too much. Progress has been made with finding a place to live so I can come visit him and eventually move in together which makes me very happy. It's been hard existing without him and I miss him a lot, I just don't want to feel it most of the time because there's nothing I can do about it right this minute. So the little energy I had, I just wanted to put into work which has yet to bear fruit. I've been resisting taking care of myself because I felt I didn't deserve it and that I didn't "measure up". I can write a whole nother post about that. 

I guess the night when I wrote this, I was simply grieving the freedom I had lost to have the kinds of conversations I want with people because it feels like an antagonist is always watching and I constantly have to watch my back and I'm tired of it. Even the people who I thought understood me are not immune to changing their minds about everything later. It's dangerous now to get close to anyone and it  never used to be that way! Especially if your truth is not 100% socially acceptable. We need to stop gaslighting ourselves and each other is what I'm saying. 

On to the commentary: 

"At that time, the alternative was to imprison myself in this gruesome bear pit of doom people around me called "reality"." - The main pattern throughout my life has been people telling me that life is shit and I will never get what I want and I need to just accept that and perform for everyone else anyway. Give up on yourself and do as I say! I've spent quite some time being suicidal. Call me a selfish bitch (they did) but I've got a dominant "I live as I choose or I will not live at all" tendency to me. Back then... Well, they just made it out that I had no choice, anything that made me feel positive emotion in any way was not important - a waste of time - anyone I considered my friend based on our shared mental and emotional bonds were not real friends because they lived far away and I needn't do anything but focus on school when I couldn't focus on school because school was relentless bullying and psychological torment that was only made worse by the torment of being made to feel like a huge burden when my grades inevitably dropped and taking away everything that made me want to live for just one moment did not do anything to improve that. I essentially felt like I was being asked to tolerate this torment like it was nothing, like my feelings didn't matter, and go on pretending life is beautiful and fake gratitude for everything I had to go through because "kids in Africa ___________!". The internet was the only place where I could say what I really think because saying what I really think in real life was instantly punished and it was clear that honesty was not ever going to be tolerated. Journals were never safe because apparently I was never entitled to privacy - for fucks sake I even invented my own cryptic alphabet just to shield my inner core from the consequences of existing in this hell. But online I could get it all out of my system. And it was rare that anyone would ever get shit for spilling their guts unless they said something overtly offensive against someone else. Now with our PC culture we've got going on you can get fired from your real life job for making one really bad joke or - god forbid - sharing your true thoughts. You can end up on the street overnight just because a few people decided they don't like you and want to ruin your life. This is like when your bully walks up to everyone you know including your parents and starts talking trash about you and convinces everyone that you're scum and don't deserve to be alive - and they believe your antagonist over you. What a time to be alive!

(Note: I pinched a nerve writing this and am now having stabbing pains all over my back if I move ever so slightly. Couldn't help but point out the irony after finishing that last paragraph)

"I essentially traded one loneliness for another." - I mean, it's only a matter of time before you learn that people might not understand you as much as you thought they did and from there it only spirals down into the realization that no one can ever fully understand you because no one has lived through what you have. I at least thought I used to have real moments with people but now? People just project whatever the fuck they want onto me, how am I supposed to really know someone is truly trying to get to know me? When you're put on a pedestal by just about everyone it's so easy to fall from grace at the most minute misunderstanding. I think anyone can relate to feeling lonely in a crowd... And the internet has gotten really, really crowded. There's only so many relatable memes you can post before it hits you that no one truly knows anything about anyone. No one has the time anymore, do we?! To really get to know a person so as to genuinely bond with them. No matter how much you think you love someone at face value, you honestly can't love them because you don't know them. We just like to think we do because of what we want to see in them and how they make us feel. 

Distractions, distractions - but how do we create something real? 

"The distress inside you grows to be unbearable and you don't notice how, the more information you consume, the more insatiable you feel..." - Hi my name is Ally and I'm an internet junkie. I've used the only thing that ever gave me safety and freedom - the internet - to run from myself and my feelings for the longest time. And while most of the reason for me constantly being online is talking to Jack, I've used it to escape things going shitty in my life for so long that I got stuck in the pattern of clicking on the next best video I see and distracting myself from everything that's going on inside me. It's gotten to the point where I couldn't even be alone in silence because I felt like something bad would happen if I let go of the grip I had on everything for just an hour. But at the same time I was trying to fill a void with information - idle words - and it was not until the depression forced me to isolate myself that I realized this was exactly what I needed. To go inside myself, be with myself, honor my boundaries - I could never allow myself that for fear that everything I had built would just crumble if I let go of control and gave energy to myself for a change. But I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my identity, for myself, so I can finally feel like I exist and I'm real and actually live my own life and not just my own personal nightmare. I know this is the right path.

It's 1AM now. I've written this commentary many times over and deleted stuff I decided is too personal to share. My head is heavy and stuffy with thoughts and I need to clear it. Thank you for reading this, please pour your thoughts out in the comments if you are so inclined. I'd just... love to know I'm not the only one who feels this way I guess. I just miss the real talk and stuff that's more than skin deep. Anything that gets my mind off of how inadequate I feel please XD 

Have a lovely evening