welcome
Well, I have written two drafts now and nothing has quite felt right. Considering I have now pushed my first post to the eleventh hour, I feel like I should start fresh and give a basic recap of where I am and how things are and where we are going.
If any of you know, I had a bit of a mental crash out at the end of 2024, beginning about election time into about Christmas. I felt myself curling up into a ball while I doom scrolled on my little black mirror and proceeded to be angry and inconsolable about the state of the world. Everything was a huge problem, I was never going to over come it all, and the only thing possible for me to do was to scroll while spacing out completely. I felt the sickness from my screen, and it was coming for the rest of my life.
I feel most of us have reached this point. Whether it be the mass commercialization of every part of our lives, late-stage capitalism consumerism, or the algorithms feeding all of us rage-bait 24/7 365, we all have the sickness. And while moving away from social media was my initial step into this year long journey, I knew my time was about to severely open up and leave me to lay in my bed, confused on how to proceed with all this available time. So, it expanded around the beginning of the year to include craft, physical media, and this here webpage - tadaaaaaa. And not to sound like your grandma, but it really is these damn phones.
I have not been as moved to create or read this much in a long long time. I have found myself crocheting in the evenings, buying probably lots of books - having devoured 3 at this point, and more actively engaging in the little media I do consume via news, YouTube, etc. I even set a couple of “field trips” for next month to continue my studies on indigenous history of Georgia that I am really excited to explore. From joining some really meaningful community groups to taking classes on spiritual practice over the course of the year, I feel actively engaged with my local community more than ever. And the quandary of it all is that I wouldn’t have found those things without social media, the internet, and careful research.
While social media and the at-large internet are becoming wastelands of what they once were, they still hold so much sacred space for ever evolving communities like in the Atlanta area. People move and things change in the blink of an eye. Thousands if not tens of thousands are moving into the metro area everyday. Where do those of us who have no community, no family, no friends start? While the old paradigm would say at churches, after-hour work hang outs, and your neighborhoods, a lot of those activities and places are no longer viable to us. As someone who spent the larger part of her college life desperately trying to force those concepts into her life, the world has changed. A we along with it.
The internet serves as a haven for so many disenfranchised and outcast. From the ye-olden years of the 90s forum chat rooms to the Tumblr-era cringe I very much dove head-first into, social media blossomed into a place where people could find one another from across time and space. Where people who were once so alone in their schools, in their churches, in their lives could suddenly find hundreds of people just like them. It was an escape for many. I think we are still holding to that once in a lifetime experience with the internet as tightly as we use to hold to old paradigms. And now, as we change evolve again, the question is where do we go next? We cannot function in the ways we use to. Us collective knows it, too. We are told to consume consume consume and numb all of our loneliness and anger with a couple more hours of For You page and Reels, but if we manage to look beyond the surface, we see it’s emptiness. Where do we go? What can we do?
As I embark on this journey at the threshold of change, that is the underlying question. And I invite you to join me on the threshold. Take away your distractions - social media or otherwise - and actively engage with the world. Get involved in community and see what’s the buzz. When we find commonality and community right outside our doors, we participate in a little act of resistance. Resisting the void, resisting the all consuming algorithms, resisting the emanant regime. Will you discover you want to own your favorite music? Will the find an unlikely bond amongst a monthly meetup at your local bookstore? Will you see the bigger picture that, if we all clue in, we have the capacity to change together? I don’t know about you, but these winds of change are necessary - as scary and uncertain as it all is. Change is needed. Change is natural. How will you change this year? Join me at the table, and we can talk all about it there.
Until Next time~
