The internet is weird. Social media even weirder. It’s where my thoughts originally found their home but eventually spiraled and where many connections were made but sometimes lost in the noise.

Remember the lo-fi mess that was MySpace? It was a pixel-filled haven and honestly, we shouldn’t have put that much personal info out there, but that platform and the Xanga and LiveJournal hubs that preceded it made me feel like I was something—someone—beyond myself, an undiscovered and unspoken self.

The noise of greed, unsheathed characters, politicized BS, unattainable imagery, look-at-this-ism, the-top-30-under-30-wake-up-at-5am-ism, fit an aesthetic, fit a number, fit a name, fit a time slot but not that time slot because I have a Zoom call then so how about this time slot. The congealing of convenience and glamor and rage and spectacle and opinion… but where does the conversation fit in? Is it behind a video or under a meme? Is it in the caption or the pinned comment? Where do I go? Where does what I do go?

In my life, where I’ve been is offline, and yes that means I’ve disconnected, not just from others but from myself in a way. I’ve mainly been in Ireland with my friends Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney throughout January, but occasionally hopped over to Korea and Japan to check out the fashion and vinyl. I’ve burrowed inside during below-freezing temps with my eczema-riddled skin and wrote thousands on thousands of words.

I’ve just returned home, an online home that doesn’t entirely feel like home anymore. I’ve done my best to hone a list of accounts that I follow that I genuinely love but at some point, even those have gotten lost in the noise and I need extraction points from the distraction points, i.e. every other damn post.

What’s insane is that I work with social media. I’m paid to do things and interact on social media. It’s why I still exist on it, experience it, connect but not as myself. I observe and sometimes I wince but sometimes I see the beauty in that connection. I know when it’s genuine, or I otherwise know when a brand is doing it right with the best kind of intentions. I have to believe there are still public-facing people and brands out there like that. It’s the only way I can continue working in media and fully embrace the social element of it for the entities I represent and for the teenage version of myself that thought the only way to go was to grow on the internet.

At the same time, I’m still working to find where I belong online. What do I call my home and when will I be evicted or priced out? Not if but when. I should go where my community is, the hoards of accounts I follow of the people and things that I genuinely admire but it’s noisy, so noisy, and the rent is high, very high, inching higher as we speak, and the landlord a crook. Is the foundation still good? I could, should, check. Maybe I’ll broadcast a bat signal into the metasphere and see who appears. I’ll tell them to meet me here for now.

Or on Bluesky. 🦋