November 18, 2024

Garbage Bin

Last Tuesday, someone made me really furious, justifiably so, and there is something so delicious about righteous fury, it’s true, and it was the kind of thing that once upon a time I would have posted about on Twitter, receiving such satisfying feedback, my feelings justified, even rewarded with attention and sympathy. LIKE LIKE LIKE. I was even noticing how difficult it was to hold these feelings all by myself, how satisfying it would have been to post them instead (though I was proclaiming them; many thanks to the people I encountered IRL who got to hear all about it) and I was planning on getting around to doing so eventually on one platform or another (maybe this one) but then after some time had passed, I realized that I didn’t actually need to anymore. Screaming my feelings onto the internet did seem like a convenient way to offload them in the moment, but then it turned out that holding them for a little while did the very same trick, and there was insight in that, for me.

(Being angry on the internet actually only ever made me angrier. One day in 2018, in my peak internet rage period, I received an email from a friend informing me that my Facebook account had been hacked, and someone was posting expletives about men having the audacity to whistle in public…but it was actually just me posting an update. And while I still have the exact same feelings about men whistling in public [honestly, it’s shrill and obnoxious. Shut up], I’m no longer losing my shit about it, and we’re all better for this.)

I have had a sense, for a long time, but during the last thirteen months in particular, that a lot of people’s refusal to sit with their uncomfortable feelings has caused our communities a great deal of trouble, created even more conflict in a moment altogether too rife with it. Where the impulse to project one’s feelings in addition to or in lieu of actually feeling them has spilled over from social media feeds to be plastered on lampposts, where people are literally arguing back and forth via graffiti spray painted onto garbage bins, and I’m so tired of all of it, of other people putting their unprocessed feelings (including anxieties) EVERYWHERE, so screaming loud that I can’t even hear my own sensibilities.

And that’s a ME problem, which I’m going to attempt to solve by taking December and January off from my remaining social media platforms (and also by not joining Blue Sky, because there’s only so many voices I need in my head), in addition to avoiding local garbage bins and dealing with my rubbish at home.