Feeling Free

Finding connection and balance in a world gone mad

iHeart's Nobody Likes Me, created in 2014.

I wrote something about the overwhelm of life online and how it’s felt to be free of Facebook and Instagram the past 50 days (and counting!), with a couple slip ups if I’m being honest. PSA: Marketplace is a gateway drug.

When I first drafted this post, I titled it “Feeling Trapped.” The revised title may come across as an odd, or even callous oversight ahead of tomorrow’s inauguration. Rest assured that feeling free is a place I have arrived and intend to remain in a reality that would seem to promise the opposite. Remember, “God is in the rain.”

Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, Issue 7, 1989.

I open my email and am met with hundreds of thousands of subject lines. The words are restless, desperate in a gross pile of prose, wrestling for my attention. There are more words here than anyone should see in a lifetime, let alone a morning. I select “delete all” for several pages before giving up my Sisyphean task.

For the love of god, would everyone please stop trying to sell me something.

I open LinkedIn and see people selling their skills, their status, their soul. Grotesque diatribes disconnected from what it means to be alive, on this planet, in this moment. False milestones distracting from what really matters, like peace, love, and understanding. (Currently devouring this Wilco cover, thanks Dave!) I hate that I can slip into corporate speak like a costume, and yet I recognize the privilege.

I love brand strategy and creative direction, *and* I’d also love to never do it again.

I open Instagram and see people selling their life choices, their routines, themselves. Pithy captions punctuated with emojis portray a strangled sense of ease:

Look how happy “we” are, how adventurous, how in love.

Look how content I am, alone, not lonely, no, never lonely.

For the love of god, I want to cry, make something just for yourself. Make it sacred.

I’ve lived the kind of life that inspires those shiny scrapbooks. Carefully coordinating columns and rows as if the right presentation could validate it, correct it, make it worthwhile. The more lost I felt in my marriage, the more I found myself hitting post. My perfectionism became pathological. I tried to paint a story so beautiful that I could convince myself there was something worth saving. In the end, that something (or someone, rather) turned out to be me.

I open Substack and see people selling growth. Wakening our collective wintering with the bullhorn of self-promotion: look at what I did. You can do it too! As if pulling ourselves through our own dark nights of the soul and being born through our personal canal of consciousness wasn’t the whole point to begin with.

I understand it, but I don’t want it. Do you hear me? I don’t want it!

I want nothing to do with any of it, and yet it is how we (barely) function, how we survive in this sick society we never asked to be a part of, but for the time being is generally preferable to the alternative.

Waking up feels like coming back from the brink of drowning, lungs still ridding themselves of the cascade that nearly ended them. I could burst with frustration, with relief, with gratitude. From the outside looking in, at least, I am free.

Too many hours spent on any app and I have to stop myself from adopting certain language patterns and trends, following invisible sets of rules. These bizarre echo chambers have given rise to the songs of our species. Where can I find the songs that don’t make a mockery of life itself? Where can I find the film photos spilling out of a dusty box in the dining room cabinet, next to a sentimental bottle of wine that has no business aging 20 years?

That’s what I’m looking for now. Life as a treasure hunt.

Here are some treasures from my year so far:

• Spending precious time (and FaceTime) with soul-restoring friends and family.

• A Discovery of Witches on AMC+, based on The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Teresa Palmer is magic, Matthew Goode is British. ‘Nuff said.

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It’s a beautiful read that has been helping me unwind conditioning around our relationship with the living world. It’s particularly poignant as so many are displaced and endangered by the LA fires.

• Eating and chatting with my love at the kitchen island. He shows me the occasional fluffy llama or penguin egg boiler and I happily accept his digital pebbling despite having little desire to join in on the scroll.

So much cuteness in one photo.

My words of the year are Connection and Balance. This combination feels like the antidote I need for a world gone online, gone awry, gone mad, just gone gone gone, hopefully not beyond reach or return. I think it’ll be on each of us to decide.

Thank you for connecting with me through being here. Sending hugs and wishing you balance as you navigate the days and weeks ahead.