It struck me recently that I’ve finally whittled down my many speaking rooms1 after more than a decade of tussling with an ever-expanding cast of online and offline spaces, including: Blogger, Livejournal, Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Substack, email, and 1-2 written journals at any time.
An approximate timeline:
2005-2009 Blogger
2009-2015 Livejournal
2009-2019 Facebook
2003-present journals
2012-present Instagram
2012-present Wordpress
2021-present Substack
2023-present email mailing list
Currently, I expect to phase out Wordpress and Instagram (without guarantee that I’ll make it).
Wordpress sentiments have been safely rehomed in my journals. As for Instagram, I’ve tired of sharing visual representations of my life or observations. My visual sensitivities have never been photographic; they have almost always been theatrical — i.e. involving space and time.
My most prolific periods on Instagram were powered by the horrific charge of scrutiny and personhood that surged through it. That repeated spiritual electrocution, painful and pleasurable, wrought a specific kind of writing out of me. That violence and voice have both come to pass.
In my first email to my personal mailing list, I wrote:
My thinking around Instagram has often ended on the note of: "Ah, but I need this because I still want to be an artist." (Do I want to be an artist?) It seems one can only professionalize by means of Internet personality exposure. Virtual proof of existence feels necessary in order for circulation, and by god doesn't an artist want/ need to circulate somehow.
I stayed suspended in that conclusion for a long time. And now, I’m expecting to reduce my speaking rooms to only my journals, Substack, and the mailing list. Looking at this line-up sends a pang of anxiety through my heart — the fear of invisibility and loss of audience.
Yet I feel hopeful about the changes this shift will bring. I’ve already noticed the quality of my attention and thinking sharpen. The freed up attention has started to seek out books, podcasts, and new ideas. And my mind’s hunger for silence and emptiness grows.
These last few weeks, listening to music on the go has become nearly unbearable. I’ve opted for instrumental jazz as a compromise. I’m toying with the idea that I might stop listening to so much music. My mind wants to think and float without noise and provocation.
Even if temporary, I feel grateful to have this time
built on the privileges I have been afforded, and the ways I have constellated into my professional network. I have my insulation and my safety nets. I hope to use them with a clear heart.
*
So what was the last straw?
I’ve mulled around uncomfortably on Instagram for years on end. I’ve continually renegotiated, trying to find a way to do IG that felt decent and livable for me. A mentor of mine once remarked that I had a way with IG, a way of balancing personhood and promotion that felt I was playing by my principles. For a while, I think I did.
On some level, I believed I would eventually find my sweet spot on that dreaded platform. One day, I’d find that flow and charge again without the spiritual damage and toxic attachment. Or one day, I’d become hot and chill enough to post selfies and get away with that as proof of my coolness, my artistry, my taste. It was a form of cruel optimism I wrought upon myself. In many ways, I could have persisted with this process.
What gave way was patience, and then expectation.
After years, it’s become clear that all I’ve been doing is dying a slow death. I’ve been allocating energy to an endeavour that makes socio-economic sense, to the detriment of my real work. You see, a constant demand for visibility really, really fucks with my work.
The way I think and operate has always been slow. Even when I’ve moved quickly, it was because I had spent a long time stewing, building up massive amounts of potential energy and schemes ready to be released.
And I’ve always been sensitive to energies and impressions from other people. I take information in without fully noticing it, and it can make its way into my work. So I’ve had to learn how to not only manage these membranes, but also be intentional about what substances (mental, psychological, emotional, physical, visual, etc.) I come into contact with.
Another feature of how I work and think: I do best when I’m a bit of an outlier and outsider, moving quietly outside of groups, with room to cultivate my own modus operandi, agenda, and ideas. I used to see this as a need for friction, for some degree of rejection and misunderstanding from others to work against. But more recently I’ve begun to understand it as a need for independence and an absence of noise from outside.
Nothing about IG is designed for this. Not that flood of noise. A study I recently read suggests that increased visibility (past a certain point) does not lead to transparency. Rather, the researchers posited, there is a transparency paradox where a large volume of available information leads to opacity if it is not treated with structure or parsed for better processing. There is a threshold to human perception that we often forget about or ignore. To me, being flooded with information and stimulation is a form of violence.
The other thing is: no matter how radical or deviant some accounts seem to be, they continue to coalesce around desires and logics that have been pre-assigned to us. By participating in way Instagram organizes the world, they inevitably reproduce these desires and logics. These messages lurk in the subconscious of our brightly lit engagement with the platform.
I feel, still, that my ability to generate and cultivate alternate desires and visions is curtailed there. Even at the best of times. Even when I discover delightful and beautiful content. Even when something there does lead me to learning.
*
Dying a slow death is one thing. The drive to extricate myself is another.
It doesn’t do it justice when I write this, but I really learnt to value myself this year. A continued practice of affirmation, discernment, and giving less fucks has given way to a different degree of peace and autonomy than I’ve ever felt before. The gravity of that escapes language. My spirit is much lighter now. And firm — neither too hard nor too soft.
This peace has given me a sense of self-assurance: that I don’t need to be seen or understood in order to feel good or have value. And while I certainly care what the people I love think and feel about me, I am less bothered by it. I trust myself to witness myself. And I trust my relationships to hold room for these gaps to be navigated in good time. There is less urgency and fear.
This made all the difference in what I chose to do when I realized I was dying: I decided I would reconstruct my media engagements to abide by my principles. I would set aside my optimism, this psychic suck on my energy.
For I no longer needed my innermost thoughts and feelings to be witnessed by others. I no longer felt the need to sustain my value through external opinion. I would take action to change my life because I trust my principles and values. Because what I think and feel about myself has become central. Has become overwhelmingly more important than the opinion of anyone else.
*
In A Director Prepares, Anne Bogart writes that
To be decisive is violent. […] To place a chair at a particular angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option. When an actor achieves a spontaneous, intuitive, or passionate moment in rehearsal, the director utters the fateful words ‘keep it’, eliminating all other potential solutions. These two cruel words… plunge a knife into the heart of the actor who knows that the next attempt to re-create that result will be false, affected and lifeless. But deep down, the actor knows that improvisation is not yet art. Only when something has been decided can the work really begin. The decisiveness, the cruelty, which has extinguished the spontaneity of the moment, demands that the actor begin an extraordinary work: to resurrect the dead. The actor must now find a new, deeper spontaneity within this set form.
Life cannot be totally compared to art, especially not the art of theatre and repetition. What I glean from this is not that we must abandon improvisation in favour of repetition. Flow is vital to life, and one mustn’t become trapped in rehearsal and preparation. Rather, Bogart here speaks to a notion that I’ve become increasingly fond of: that the art of living requires us to choose the repetitions we will devote ourselves to.
For life, even without the metaphor or interference of art, is repetitive. To face the task of living, one must learn to face the task of repetition. How can repetition produce freedom? How can repetition produce motion? How can repetition produce meaning?
No matter how meandering, nomadic, or free your lifestyle, you cannot escape repetition. Breathing is one such task. So are eating, sleeping, defecating, walking, blinking, speaking. So is the maintenance of any relationship. And any given day, any given life, has a limited amount of time and energy. If you decide to not choose how you use your time and energy, you’ve made a choice. You’ve chosen to give your agency away.
Crucially, this isn’t a binary choice between freedom and discipline, flow and structure. For me the two are always intertwined. Flow and creativity thrive on parameters, limits, and/ or structures. Through discipline, I begin to practice incredible freedom.2 This is true of art. This is true of life.
To choose how you live your life is not to restrict it to a list of activities, or to schedule it so there isn’t a moment of open time. It is to choose a direction you will face for the moment, even for the day, that aligns with your values. It is to set certain parameters that will help you practice what you believe in, and to engage deeply with life in the process. You should still improvise. But you should choose the room in which you’re dancing in.
In my life, this has been more about saying no than saying yes. Right now, in the world I live in, excess feels easy and inevitable.3 Everything leans more towards too much than too little. Overwhelm is easy. Indigestion from eating too much is normal.
And so the choices I feel we must make now are around our “no”s. What we won’t accept, what we don’t want in our lives. By doing so, we begin to identify our clear, solid “yes”es. Our commitment to them is renewed and grows.
Yeah, I don't look too hard
I don't gotta know all thе cards I keep
Keeping out the rest of it is what I need
Till it comes to meLinying, “Faith”
*
I spent most of my youth making choices that would keep my possibilities as open as possible. I posted a declaration of this philosophy on Instagram (lol), which went mildly viral (lol):
I still stand by this mode of operation. As my agility develops, this mode allows me to shift my weight easily. It allows me to travel in and out of different spaces and wear different masks. I learn a lot from this breadth of experiences.
But within this practice, I see the need to make decisions. To take action on my principles. To name my devotions and go deeper with them. For one, to minimize my material belongings. And another: to find a structure and flow for my life so I can devote myself to writing and theatre.
I guess I come back again and again to these two questions Maggie Rogers posed herself:
How do I keep the things sacred in my life really safe?
How do I reconstruct every aspect of my life and my career to keep those things at the centre?
According to Bogart, this will require some violence. I see it too, the way things must be rearranged around my new priorities. How my greed to do everything at once must submit to smallness. I have begun to minimize. I have begun the work of finding that “new, deeper spontaneity” — the devotion towards life that no audience, no platform, no public declaration can give me.
⊹₊。ꕤ˚₊⊹
— learn more about my work on my website
— read two poems I wrote that were published in QLRS
I call them speaking rooms because I struggled to speak as a child and teenager, so I opted to write instead. I was privileged in this way: to be able to converse with myself from an early age, in intense and protracted ways, through inscriptions that allowed me to revisit previous thoughts and feel repulsion, curious, vanity, recognition, relief, and sadness. I hope that there was joy, though I have no such recollection.
Dancers and jazz musicians seem especially aware of this.
Excess for me is not abundance. Excess is the space of dissociation and distraction, while abundance belongs to the realm of deep joy and connection. Abundance is when we recognize the good we already have, and learn how to cultivate it through love and awareness. Abundance is when we stay curious about the wealth of experiences and wisdom in the world. Abundance is when we cherish the vastness we’ve always walked in. This can take place through material or immaterial experiences — but it always leads to that deep point within the spirit, where you feel safe, solid, airy, light. In that state, all urgency melts away.