Problem(s)
Lately, I've been facing recurring episodes of alternating feelings of happiness and sadness. One moment I'm happy that I'm pursuing something that I love and another moment I'm sad that I'm not able to have fulfilling conversations with the people around me, being stuck in my own inner struggle and trying to ease the tug of war that's happening in my prefrontal cortex: should I do this or that? I'm worried about not being able to cater time to deeply rewarding work and instead burning it away doing mundane, energy-sapping activities. I've set the bar of expectations so high that it's difficult for me to reach that and so the next easiest thing to do is to go back to doomscrolling and doing things that give me a momentary sense of productivity, like erasing my weekly plan and doing it all over again and many more things that I don't fancy recollecting and putting them down here.
I wrote a thread on Twitter talking about my penchant for words and how I thought I lost a little bit of that ability because of reasons mostly unknown to me. I wrote about how I yearn to revert back to that previous version of myself when I had within my reach the right word to use for any given sentence and make it sound beautiful. I was reminiscing the time when I was still a student at school and enjoyed writing like it was the only thing I knew was my calling. Writing that thread was almost like I hopped onto a time machine and took a ride back to the beautiful memories that only live in my head now.
But the thread had a terrible death. Similar to how a lot of my writings and longings to express my thoughts do not go past my drafts, that thread too ended up almost like that, but even worse. I tweeted it but deleted that entire thing and also a few other recent tweets of mine. Deleting them was almost like I had slaughtered a chunk of memories that I preserve through Twitter. I use Twitter as a time machine that stands as evidence to my personality at different points in time and shows how I've evolved over the course of tweeting repeatedly in public. So if my tweets mean so much to me, why then did you delete them you might ask. Because I started equating the quality of my creative expression with the engagement it received. This happened to the extent that I felt sometimes that whatever I was writing was stilted, tailor-made to help me fit in, and sprinkled with vocabulary that would make me feel less foreign from the group of people I intended to interact more with. I have written a lot of Twitter threads this month than I had ever done before. They pertained to areas that highly interest me. They were related to things that I'd any day be down to discussing over a conversation. But the irony of the situation is, I edited them way more than I'd like, sometimes for hours even ( I'm not exaggerating ), only so that they'd make me feel more in line with the thoughts of people I admired finding on my timeline.
Learning from people who admire you is not bad, you should definitely do that and I do that too. That is how we learn and create better world views. But doing it to the extent that it kills the very identity that makes you unique is downright unhealthy, to say the least, and that's exactly what happened to me.
Solution(s)
More often than not, whatever I write ends with a solution to the problems that I focus on, in that article. This article is no different.
To begin with, it is fair enough to say that I don't have all the answers. Am I sad and unhappy with my writings because there was once a time when the engagement I received on my tweets was so high and now there's literally not even a single person who is interested to hop into a conversation on stuff I tweet about? Or is it because I'm trying to fit into an artificial box that I created, on how I should behave to attract the right people, or is it because I'm constantly comparing myself to people my age and belittling myself, which is so much more easier when you're active on social media? Or is it because I highly miss the person that I once was and I'm not able to bring that person back to existence? Or is it because of an intersection of all these and more problems that are much more toxic and deep-rooted than I realize? The simple and straightforward answer is, I don't know.
I thought a social media break could rid me of these negative emotions. But all it gave was short-lived happiness and control. After a while, all those insecurities rushed back and crippled me even more. I thought trying to impulse tweet whatever I felt without thinking about how people would take it would help me deal with this "censorship of my creative expression". That didn't help either. I have a sudden urge to speak to people. Not exactly sure about what, but I want to speak. I was always extremely reticent and reserved about my thoughts and only let those closest to me know what I truly felt. I'm still the same, but a part of me craves for conversations deeply. The craving is much more severe than I'd like to admit. But I can't just go on conversations without having an agenda in mind and that too with complete strangers on the internet. Sounds scary. But still I want to talk to people and listen to their perspectives on things, that deeply interest me. I didn't know how to ask people for it, so that came out in the form of writing on Twitter and expecting for someone to see it, leading to a fruitful conversation. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. People hearted my tweets, but never really got back to talk. None of my heartfelt ( yet edited ) threads urged someone to ask me to explain and elaborate more. Never was there a time when someone disagreed with what I said and sparked a discussion. Never. I was stuck in this vicious loop of writing, expecting and then writing more with more expectations. This baggage that I attached to writing defeated the purpose of this activity and slowly started killing me in the process and thus, the frustration and anger, finally culminating into sadness.
If there's something I learned after writing this, it is that writing to me is pleasurable only as long as I don't attach any mental baggage to it. I started writing this to make sense of the huge number of contradictory and tiring thoughts in my head and to understand exactly what I'm facing and try to find solutions to it. I didn't exactly find actionable solutions, but I did find something abstract atleast. After breaking my emotions down to their most basic level, I understood what I exactly want and how it is coming out in the form of frustration. I want to listen to more engaging conversations. I want to have good discussions. I want to interact and make friends with people I admire and I think the best way to do that is nothing but dialogic communication.
Writing was always a completely different piece in this puzzle. I attached it to the urge to converse and burdened it with expectations. And when those expectations couldn't be realized, I blamed myself.
So the conclusion is, if I want to have a discussion with someone, I will actively seek to ask them directly. I won't burden writing to do that for me. This was a painfully obvious choice I had, that I failed to take up because my judgment was clouded with insecurities. Now that I've cleaned up my lenses, we'll take on life from a new perspective :)