Offering: March 24, 2024
Withdrawal & fugitivity
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of becoming real this past year. By becoming real I mean being real to myself and then sharing the realness with others. Becoming real isn’t just about noticing my own wants, needs, and desires, but also valuing and taking them seriously and in doing so learning to better value and take seriously the wants, needs, and desires of others as well.
This project has involved a lot of unlearning, and on a good day I feel like I’m about five percent of the way toward where I’d like to be. But I truly believe love thrives on the adventure of otherness1, which makes the knee-jerk, peace-keeping imperative to smooth over realness and elide difference in relationship somewhat antithetical to love. Which is all to say it feels very worthwhile.
One of the first things I noticed when I started to focus on becoming real was how awful I felt every time I went on Instagram. The “I’m leaving social media” statement is its own genre of essay at this point, and unfortunately this is not going to be that kind of essay.
And though it may be tempting to judge such gestures as trivial or ineffective, I actually think that to withdraw from self-surveillance and attention-harvesting in times of modern power is as much political gesture as it is personal preference. The fact that Instagram makes me feel as bad as it does and I haven’t quit yet tells me just how unsilly it is.
I think Instagram wants to make me less real. As Mark Fisher has argued in Capitalist Realism, capitalism as we know it lives and flourishes through “the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.” This is something I knew intellectually, but that was made real for me in acute grief.
And it wasn’t the advertisements or sponsored posts whetting my appetite for their products but the fact that my world had come apart and then I’d go on Instagram and everyone I knew was laughing and smiling. It made me feel like I should be laughing and smiling too, straight through the end of the world. And the more incapable I was of doing that the worse I felt. And I felt pretty bad as it was.
I was in heavy mourning for most of last year, and the more I realized how intensely the world wished to take it away the more protective of grief I became. At times I mourned stubbornly, or out of what felt like sheer spite. But I also knew early on it was crucial to stay with because of how intense it was and how ancient it felt.
At one point I was even mad at my zinnias. It was absolutely that deep, but then I’d open Instagram and start to think it was wrong. This rage is disproportionate, this despair too intense, the weight of it all too enduring. But mourning’s an endangered experience as it is, and I knew that if I wanted my process to live I’d have to pull back and protect it.