Today's sentiment: Muted.
Over the last few days I’ve had a brief reprieve from having to go anywhere. I had an idea for an essay, so I started working on it, but it sure has been discouraging. I forgot how hard it is to actually write about a single topic. Lately I’ve allowed myself to descend full throttle into this kind of publicly-displayed diary writing, where I can freely write whatever sentences I like without worry whether or not they have anything to do with the topic at hand. Maybe there’s a way to direct that same attitude towards essay writing, but I haven’t really figured it out yet.
I blame all my problems on not interacting with enough strangers on the internet. I definitely talk to internet people a lot, but they tend not to be strangers. They’re all people I’ve known for years. I’ve write a lot about the internet lately because I’ve ceased to use the internet to form new experiences, and instead it’s become like a cheap restaurant beneath my apartment that I go to every other night, to get the dirty work of relieving my hunger done and over with.
I remember when conversation — internet conversation — felt like an art form. Now I just feel like I’m half-asleep most of the time, sometimes finding myself in front of a computer, with words before me that I have something resembling a response to.
My earlier interactions on the internet seemed to have a greater propensity to spill over into awkward real life encounters with strangers even weirder than myself. I graduated from high school a year early and spent a year in my room, without talking to anyone in person. I’d go weeks without even speaking to my parents. I made a bunch of internet friends during that time that I would meet in person until years later. One might say I was planting the seeds of something. I eventually I went to college and started engaging with human civilization. Who knows what kinds of seeds I’m planting now. Maybe the time for planting has passed, and now I’m forced to reckon with the reality of how inadequate all my preparation was — not that I ever considered I was ever preparing for anything.
In the years after I started talking to people in person again, it was nice to encounter people on the internet who were messed up in ways I’d once been messed up. I talked to other people who’d dropped out of school and lived in their parents’ house without doing anything. I always feel an instant sense of trust towards people like that. All of the people around me, who have jobs, or at least obligations that they have to perform everyday, and who seem to actually succeed at doing them, all feel like strangers to me. I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing them. Not everyone has parents that can let their children stay in the basement for months or years at a time. Some people have to work. Other people have dreams.
I certainly had dreams, when I was spending everyday in bed. I miss when my dreams had no connection to reality. I miss when human bodies had become abstractions, and when I’d forgotten what my own voice sounded like.
When you live on the internet, it’s so easy to throw people away. If after many months there’s someone you’re still talking to, if they haven’t thrown you away yet and you’ve somehow resisted the urge to throw them away, then that means something. You’ve chosen each other. They’re not like the classmates and coworkers whose bodies you somehow find in proximity to yours each day, speaking words to you that somehow get responded to through the mysterious mechanisms of human language.
That was one of the deep shocks I got when I started college after a year of not talking to people. Every time I got locked in conversation with strangers, words would somehow come to my lips when questions were asked of me and it was time for me to speak. I’d spent a whole year convinced I wasn’t capable of speech without spending 30 minutes planning out each sentence.
Perhaps at a pivotal point in my development, my soul got sucked into the internet, and since then I’ve only been able to engage with reality through some other part of my body — the meaty parts that don’t connect to my soul. Shortly afterwards, material circumstances demanded I start spending more time looking directly into the faces of other people, faces made of real flesh, covered in oil and sweat. I forgot how to use the internet. Or the internet forgot me. Or maybe I just got older. Something got left behind and was never replaced. I’m spending everyday speaking a language that’s not native to me.
Well, what does any of this have to do with writing essays? I’m not actually sure, but I can take a guess. Often when I get stuck somewhere in an essay, I think to myself “if only I had a personal anecdote I could insert here.” I imagine some door in my brain that I could open, the door to a little office that the other me sits in all day. I imagine going in there, looking the other me in the eye, not needing to communicate the task I need him to preform. He stands up without a word, I follow him out of the office, and we proceed on a mental journey to parts of my psyche I never knew were there. In concrete terms, I imagine these other psychic districts as elevated lines of a city subway system. Me and office me are too poor to actually waste money on two subway tickets, so we walk together beneath the elevated tracks, snow falling around us, melting on our identical red Adidas track jackets, the collar zipped to our chins. The cold permeates my fingers, crawls up my arms and down my armpits, reaching in for my heart. Every step becomes heavier and heavier — like we’re walking through Jell-O. Without even realizing it, I regain consciousness, back in front of my computer, but now the Pages document I had open is filled with words — the exact personal anecdote I needed for my essay is all filled in and nicely typed. There are haunting details from conversations I apparently had with strangers in public restrooms — details I could never make up on my own.
I keep wanting the internet to be like that — a portal to people who can take me places. Was it ever like that? Will it ever be like that?