dropping the act

we're ritual killing shame and you're all invited*

Surveillance has been at the top of my mind recently. The ways in which we are watched, watch each other, impose an inner critical eye upon ourselves, and how shame and the idea of “effortlessness” have trapped us. Really, I’m talking about myself, and I always am, but I’ll jump the gun and use “we” and “us” for things I struggle to pin to myself in the hopes that someone reading will see themself here, and I can speak freely, as if in conversation with an understanding friend. Even in writing this, it’s hard not to stop before I’ve begun, fearful of misrepresenting myself and, compoundingly, representing a version of myself it’s brutally obvious that I am not, this fear borne of letting myself seep between fingers and floorboards until I force the gaps closed. We face it in attempts to convey ourselves through means outside of the spoken word, this banal self-criticism and brutal analysis.

I tend to fail to interpret myself successfully, and I make myself believe it’s starkly apparent in every other form of my presence I’ve curated. The focus on curation may be at fault here. We create our online selves confined in the space left for us after peeling away what embarrasses us, sloughing off what reveals us, putting the key into shame’s padlock. There’s not much left of me after all this editing, just a little flinching thing that’s worn itself thin. Stick your hand between the cushions of comparison and conformity and you’ll find the last remaining crumbs of truth, clinging to your palm and tucked under your fingernails. 

Scrolling is the death march of authenticity, closing and immediately reopening the same app = compulsions of the damned. Coming across your critical review of that movie I fuck with doesn’t make me dislike you, but falsely deciding this is the pen with which I’m writing my story and you’re writing yours has made you a bit smaller (letterboxd-review-sized), simpler, and uglier, and I’ve done the same to myself. I hold others to the same magnifying glass burning a tunnel of light through my back. We have all been the surveillant and the surveilled. 

I know none of these things carry an inherent evil, and I hope you can read between the lines of my drama and hyperbolic tendencies. Maybe my sense of self is easily manipulated, maybe that’s the name of the game when you’re at the wise old age of twenty. What I am and what I love is very clear to me, but I struggle to wring it out of myself and into your waiting arms. I know that through creation, whether that’s a paint-by-numbers gifted to me three months ago or a newborn blog post, we make ourselves most known. I’ll keep posting until I can do it right, I’ll continue envying those of you who announce your nature in everything you do.

In any case. I find much-needed clarity when you’re near and I reach for your warm wrist or shifting in your seat trying to make a hard bench soft causes your thigh to brush my own. Your voices echo in my ear even after walking towards opposite ends of the same street after a long night of revealing the best and worst parts of ourselves, and my ‘09 car promises to take you home along with my ‘03 heart. My love for you and the earnest world remains boundless and swelling!

*I don’t like writing about social media! There’s something deeply unholy and manufactured about it that pains me to put into writing, so know that I’m suffering, and read closely.