The Shiny Luster of the Internet is Gone

now all I want is to work in secret and emerge in years with finished art

I remember when I thought it was so cool to be on social media. 

I remember figuring out the language of Twitter, really getting it, and feeling like I had achieved something.

I remember seeing people who weren’t on social media and thinking, “Why wouldn’t they be? Don’t they see what an opportunity this is?”

I remember people saying to me that they didn't really “get” social media, and then they’d say, “but you do – you’re so good at it!”

I was proud. Proud to be good at it. 

I worked to be good at it.

I worked to make my posts likable, funny, clever. I could be everyone’s friend.

When did it switch? For a long while it was a place where I’d go to say something funny, or something helpful. Then it turned into a place where I went for no reason at all. Or where I’d go as a reward for writing one sentence in my manuscript. I’d reward myself for closing Instagram by going on Twitter.

There was a point, maybe it was 2020, although probably it was 2016, where that excitement for being noticed, for being witty, turned into something more negative. I could be witty in my little square, and other squares were witty too. But every time I went on, the percentage of witty squares went down, the percentage of mean squares went up. 

It started to feel like being a comedian with a terrible, unruly audience. And then I realized I could walk off the stage. 

My life is built of processes and practices. Writing process, meditation practice, parenting, exercise, doing the dishes, folding laundry, walking, stretching. They’re not pretty. They’re not worth photographing and sharing in a little square. 

And while I know social media is often all shiny outcomes, and that there surely was a messy process, a practice of trial and error, behind that curated glimpse, still my brain refuses to believe it, and then I deflate a bit, because I don’t have the outcome in that perfect square. 

For a while I made it a practice to purposely post sloppy process, to post the failures, but that too was making my process into outcomes. 

I don’t owe it to anyone on social media apps to show them any part of my day. My time is better spent in process and practice. My time is better spent staring at a squirrel out the window. There are things that I do not consider a great use of my time, especially my quiet time during the day when my kids are at school – going to Target, looking at the books in Goodwill, watching a tv show, napping, looking at the mugs in Goodwill, buying a croissant and a coffee – and all of those are a better use of my time than social media. (They might, in fact, be fine uses of my time if they afford me space to think and dream.)

You may feel differently. But I know this is true for me. 

Now I hear about someone who’s not on social media, and I think, “YES.” I hear about someone who deleted all of their accounts, and I think, “RIGHT ON!” I hear about someone saying they’re not good at social media, and I think, “don’t bother!”

There was an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago (unlocked link) about this artist from the 1970s named Bradford Boobis. The whole article is an interesting story, about how Boobis’s paintings disappeared on the night he died at age 44 of a heart attack, and how his nephew spent decades trying to find them and get them back. But I keep thinking about this: Boobis, in addition to being a great painter, decided to start a religion (cult) where the “works of man” (art, science) were holy. He wanted there to be temples with art, including his own, in them, and people would come in, take off all their clothes (I don’t know why!), light a torch, and be part of the creative spirit. 

And, I mean, there’s a lot there. But I’d like to take a tiny bit of that energy. Or maybe even more than a tiny bit. If I’m going to be writing, why not, well – ok, no, I’m not going to start a cult of myself. But isn’t there something to that? To thinking your art is good enough that you could start a cult which included your art as holy, if you were a cult-starting sort of person? 

If I’m not going to be so focused on sharing my outcomes on social media, and I’m keeping large parts of my process and practice to myself, then I can also have this secret cult of my own creativity. It’s not going to bother anyone. There are no membership fees. You don’t have to follow me. But I’ll go forth knowing my art is worthy of worship. And yours is too! We’ll all have secret invisible nonexistent cults. We’ll have the possibility of a cult.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is this: don’t sell yourself short. There are plenty of avenues to compare myself to other writers and then to feel bad that I’m not succeeding the way they are. Social media was a way for me to constantly feel like “I’m good at this. I’m good at this one, tiny thing that I don’t even have that much control over.” But that sells me short. What if, instead, I’m good at these big things? What if I make art worth putting in a temple of creativity? What if I sell myself TALL? (is that a thing?)

Social media comparison happens because it’s an extension of real world comparison we’ve been taught to do. But what if you stop comparing for a moment and accept that we’re all amazing at whatever it is we’re doing, that we are all our own cults of our own awesomeness? And every person you see is doing INCREDIBLY AMAZING at being themselves? And how could you compare, really, because it doesn’t make any sense. I’m doing a great job of being Julie but I would not do a good job of being you. 

I love the word sonder, meaning that moment when you realize that every person you pass on the street has a rich and complex inner life, just like you do. Social media doesn’t show us enough of a person, enough of their reality, to see all of their complexity. I spent so many years performing for pieces of people and for robots.

I’ve had the book Codependent No More for a few years and I’ve been afraid to read it. I finally did and I know why I was scared. It was like reading about the inside of my brain. I learned it’s not my job to control everyone’s experiences! It’s not my job to make sure everyone is feeling happy! This was mind-blowing news to me. So much of my social media interaction involved trying to make sure everyone was happy and satisfied. But that wasn’t possible, and it was burning me out. 

I don’t know if you’ve seen The Banshees of Inisherin, but it’s about the end of a friendship, and I related very strongly, especially after reading about codependency, with the Colin Farrell character. His former friend has told him very clearly that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, and not to talk to him, and Colin Farrell’s Pádraic cannot stop himself from bugging his old friend. Everyone is like “HE TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY!” and Pádraic is all, “yeah, I know, but but but” and he crosses those boundaries and then tries to make it better by saying, “Did you finish your fiddle tune? Oh, you did? That’s wonderful!” And so much of not only social media but also my interactions with people (just ask my children) is me playing nice even when people (or the outrage of social media) has told me to back off. But it’s me! I’m so nice! So it must be ok!

It’s hard for me. I want attention, I want praise, I want validation, and it has taken me until now to realize the best place for me to get that is from within. I am craving space and time. I am shaking off the memory of being good at social media, and remembering instead a time when I was good at imagining stories, and I’m going forward from there.

Hi! In case you missed it, I made an online class about revising picture books called Make a Mess, Clean It Up: How to Revise a Picture Book. It’s pre-recorded, so it’s all there, right now. You can take it today if you want. It’s $47.

There are a limited number of scholarships for marginalized writers; reply to this email if that’s you and you can’t afford the class and want to take it.

To celebrate the launch of the class, I’m giving away two picture book critiques. Everyone who signs up for Make a Mess, Clean It Up by May 15, 2023 will be entered. (That’s two weeks from now!)

Behind the Paywall

All I can tell you is I keep running into birds. I don’t know what it means. There are birds everywhere. You can see these birds in the story prompts. They are huge, cartoon birds. 

Also! There is a new monthly project happening for paying subscribers. I got a creative writing textbook at a used bookstore, and doing the assignments in it are really helping me generate new words and scenes in this novel I’m working on, so now I am going to go through the book and share the assignments. You can check out the first post (chapter one: Discovering Ourselves in Writing). Remember that you get a 14-day trial if you want to test the waters. Chapter two is Discovering Ourselves in Reading and it’s been opening up so much for me; the post for that comes in a week or two.

Thoughts and Links

• I have a book about a president’s dog saving the country, coming out right before the next U.S. presidential election. Eva Byrne posted a teensy bit from the endpapers on Instagram, and the entire book is as cute as what she posted.

• I bought a new pair of socks (exciting, I know) and they are…the best socks? Collegien Varsity, I got the yellow. They’re French. So now I’m someone who says, “oh, these? these are these marvelous French socks I love.”

• Relevant to everything: This Day Intentionally Left Blank from

  Grant Snider

• One of the plants in my office was housing fruit flies. I got mad at it, and put it outside, hoping the fruit flies would fly off, but there was a frost and the plant died. I already felt guilty about it, and then I read this scientific article about how stressed plants scream. Ugh. I have spent a lot of time apologizing and explaining myself to the rest of the plants.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• My kid read and adored Planning Perfect by Haley Neil and enthusiastically shoved it at me. She was correct. Read it if you love truly hilarious queer rom coms, and Vermont.

• Evergreen by Matthew Cordell is an adorable story about bravery and soup.

• Paradise Sands by Levi Pinfold is mystical, trippy and a little scary, but also riveting and gorgeous. (Dorson Plourde, I should just email you, but instead I’m telling you here to read this book.)

• I subscribe to the “Read Like the Wind” newsletter and have loved all of the books I’ve read on their recommendation. In December they recommended Lady into Fox by David Garnett. I inter-library-loaned it, and forgot about it. I finally got it a few weeks ago, didn’t read it, and then tried to renew it, but couldn’t, because there was a hold on it. There is one copy of this book in Maine and perhaps enough subscribers to this reading newsletter that the hold list is long on this 100-year-old book. I read it in a day before returning it (it’s 96 pages long). Imagine When Women Were Dragons but from the husband’s point of view, and in 1920s England. A woman turns into a fox, getting wilder by the day, and her devoted husband keeps shoving her into silk jackets and wondering how to keep her from chasing ducks.