social meeds reflections, boundaries, free palestine
In the Spring of 2005 my friend and I essentially locked ourselves in the Hartwick College Anthropology lab (with a notorious closet full of skulls) until our finals were over and graduation was in sight. She asked me if I had heard about this party she had gotten an invite to on facebook, and I asked- “What’s facebook”. She showed me how to sign up for it and we chuckled that at the very least it would be a fun distraction during finals week. We sent each other articles from The Onion like about dolphins developing opposable thumbs and defeating humans, live Bill Withers videos on Youtube, articles about worker-owned bookstores and vegetarian restaurants. To say that being the first generation to have the next 20 years of my life documented online has not only been more than a minor distraction, sometimes it feels like a nasty trick, a huge embarrassment, and like I was the guinea pig for one of the weirdest and most public psychological social experiments of all time.
I wanted to create a self-hosted website as some sort of compromise between myself and humanity- that if I want or need to have an online presence, at least I want it to belong to me. Especially after recently noticing how the war in Gaza has changed the shape of social media once again, especially after permanently deleting facebook, and especially after deactivating a 10 year instagram account that had become a painful and succinct reflection of the way my “community” was quickly dismantled upon my beginning to set healthier boundaries and learning how to communicate more directly and honestly (stick up for myself).
My perhaps obvious observation on social media lately is that people who are talking about politics and the war in Gaza are shadow banned or unfollowed by the masses, and if you say nothing you are a terrible person and personally responsible for all of the problems on the planet. From the feminist standpoint- I see how social media has transformed from privately owned companies that were once about sharing snapshots, useful info, and inside jokes with friends, are now corporations owned by the same handful of men who control most of the resources on the planet. By sticking around we gave our consent to them to steal our ideas and creativity, and censor our thoughts. And to use the profits they make benefitting from our reliance on social media to fund warfare. I suppose it is easier to cancel celebrities for not posting on instagram their wide knowledge of religious nationalism, instead of canceling relying on Instagram and celebrities for information and instructions on how to think, or instead of canceling our toxic employers and amazon accounts. I see creative people who don’t fit in with mainstream culture being clever and using social media to bolster themselves financially- being divided, shut down, and silenced once again.
On Saturday mornings working at the gym, about 5 giant television screens scattered across the room, occasionally something would catch my eye, usually a broken Olympic record or amazing highlight of the week- on October 7 I was magnetized to the one that showed CNN and I stood there and stared and processed for quite awhile. A few others would come up and stand with me for a moment or two, acknowledge the curious foreboding heaviness and then say whatever needed to be said for it to be acceptable to leave the conversation to go and do a set of bicep curls (No shade~ workout time is sacred time, this is what our lives have become, do the bicep curls). I texted my friend who responded accurately and succinctly to how I was feeling, trying to take in the events that were happening in real time, but also knowing that this was about to be a huge thing, he said: “Watch us surely get on the wrong side of this one”.
That week on the Ricochet show I played Eva Cassidy’s take on the song Imagine for John Lennon’s birthday and have revisited the song a few times since then and just, have a hard time finding the words to describe what kind of exhaustion 40 years of feeling like I live on the wrong side of my home country has done to my nervous system and mental health- and having to continuously process the resentment of the effort it takes to simply exist here as a single mom and a neurodivergent woman. Not just politically, but I also feel the more I understand and direct my life towards the service of God, the less I relate to the “Christians” who are running the United States, and the Catholic church I grew up in. And then the immediate guilt because at least I have running water and can wear shorts out in public.
Observing the latest presidential election in Mexico and the first leftist woman president Claudia Sheinbaum truly made me cry and brought up a lot in me- remembering my sadness for Hillary Clinton eight years ago, and I don’t even like Hillary Clinton, and preparing myself to possibly feel some version of that way again in November. Learning about both Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez, and then returning here to the status of our country’s current election made me cry some more; despite the violence and dysfunction that occurs in Mexico, spending time in a politically neutral country with a woman president is sounding interesting and appealing to me as of late.
I’ve been to the protests. I have consistently talked about Gaza and played pertinent music on the radio show, I’ve watched the news and listened to podcasts, I’ve talked about it a bit on social media but have not devoted my world to it- as I have never devoted my world to social media; because while it might be a useful or enjoyable piece of receiving information, it has simply become another corporation that wants to control my thoughts, steal my presence & creativity, and create made up competition towards other women, to set myself up for more abusive and toxic behavior that I will need to figure out how to excuse or at least make sense of.
I hate this war in Gaza so much that it has been hard to digest. Truly, nauseating, all the time. We are told that “destroying Hamas” is not the same technically as a genocide? Being told that sticking up for one group means hating another? It’s the same triangulation, word salad, gas lighting, and redundant excuses abusers use to convince us that we are the problem. And what makes me more inclined to focus my work lately on helping people recover from abuse and trauma by getting strong, and keeping my activism slightly more personal, or posting about it on here, talking about it with people in person, reading and reflecting as well, and relieving myself of pressure to post anything online other than what I would like to.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to posting more here now that I have somewhat of a plan for the next few months. Maybe my plans include becoming an EMT and buying an ambulance to convert into a camper, and driving it to Mexico for awhile- and you’re going to want to hear about that right? Also, have you listened to the new Ani Difranco album yet?
