Created By Izzy

I’ve never really taken to being public on the internet. The very thought of it, of being the kind of person who chooses to share their life and mind with an online world, produces within me a feeling of constriction, beneath my ribs, right in the solar plexus, some inner turning away. Who am I to be seen?

But there are people I love who I don’t call on the phone. People I want to give the option to have a look at my life, to hear me in a way that never seems to translate in conversation. Somehow unable to project my voice across a dinner table, who am I to speak up? Wouldn’t it just be rude to change the subject to something I could actually speak on? Where did I learn what was ‘rude’ in the first place? The question tugs at memories of childhood dinner tables, red sauce on a gingham table cloth and my graceless hands clutching a fork held backwards. Is the way I see the world important? The constriction in my gut is the only thing that definitively tells me ‘no’. I think anyone I might ask would tell me otherwise.

As far as I know, nobody intentionally taught me not to speak up. Maybe it’s a side effect of having been born a girlchild. These days I’ve got no hesitation lifting my voice to song, to recitation, to probing question and opinioned speech. At least that’s what I believe. But posting on the internet? God help me. The only trace of my online existence is a hermetically sealed Instagram account, 12 photographs posted in as many years. The dregs of a 21st century teenager’s rites of passage. An empty Facebook profile where, somehow, my grandmother could see when I was ‘interested’ in a Death Rites ceremony. A LinkedIn profile made to appease a college career advisor.

These websites feel like places, and none of those places feel like me, despite the conspicuous attachment of my name and likeness. I don’t believe I could avoid the internet even if I tried, and despite all my grumbling about the associated societal breakdown, I have yet to even try. I can’t remember a day I’ve gone without it and that very thought makes me feel I’ve lost control of my own existence. Maybe that isn’t the internet’s fault. Whatever my mind conceives of as ‘internet’ is but one nexus in the constellation of thoughts that poke at the bruise of the ever-lurking ‘end of the world feeling’ I carry beneath my skin. The ‘end of the world’ feeling is a bit besides the fact. I’ve read enough books and I’ve met enough people to know that the feeling is timeless and omnipresent, a facet of the human condition.

I’m not happy with my relationship to the internet. I remember being a young teen, my hands shaking, as I scroll through pictures of myself on my fifteen minute break from bagging groceries. A friend had taken the photos of me on the bleachers as we watched the boy’s baseball game after school. My mind reels as I ponder a suitably self-expressive lyric from the Smith’s Pretty Girls Make Graves to caption my downturned gaze. Anything but my own words. Real, physiological fear, the kind that makes my legs quake as my heartbeat rises up behind my face, as I settle on a filter and post the picture. A two-dimensional compression of pixels immortalize my teenage insecurity. The feeling in my body subsides as girls from the theater club begin to comment on how pretty they think I am. How truly bizarre that staring at an inanimate rectangle could rile up my sympathetic nervous system, and then calm me back down, in the span of minutes. I think I’ll spend my life unpacking this dynamic.

Sharing myself on the internet has always made me feel fear. My personal philosophy tells me fear should be followed, and I’ve been talking myself up to this edge for months. Curated pictures of my life mean nothing to me, but the words that run through me are everything I have to offer of myself. I imagine having this space for my writing might be just what I need. What I need to feel like a writer, to feel a little less passive towards this whole internet thing, a little more in control of my life. Things my psyche needs to experience, so that when I’m old and I finally accept that any semblance of control was nothing more than an illusion, I’ll know that when everybody else was screaming into the void, I had the guts to say my piece as well.