Maybe this is something

I think I’m supposed to be networking more if I want to be a real writer (read: paid writer). I’m supposed to be reading a hell of a lot more, I know that. I don’t even know where to submit my stuff because I don’t read the kind of stuff I write. I am overwhelmed by the amount of content in the networking space for writers. I can’t manage the attention or organization needed to properly cast my net. I just keep writing these things hoping some kind soul will discover me and say Hey, let me help you with the stuff you suck at. Also, I printed some other blog posts for you. I stapled a picture of each author’s face to the front so you can imagine the human who wrote it while you read, you mentally-disabled dinosaur. I think that would really help me.

There is not even a small part of me that wants to lean into consumption of internet content. It feels like my body rejects it at the cellular level. In fact, I want to spearhead a campaign against it. I think every one of us could benefit from staring at a blank wall awhile. At the same time I know my shitty attitude about content keeps me separated from what I long for which is creative connection. The internet is the time I live in and I need to accept that. I don’t have enough friends to be one of those weirdos who lugs a typewriter to the coffee shop. Literally no one would read my words and the line between writing a book of essays and writing a manifesto is an audience. I cannot exist as a writer without utilizing the internet. I’m not sure what my hesitation is. It’s probably fear. I am afraid of the internet. Am I the only one? Is it because I am old? I’m not old, actually, it’s just my heart I think. Or maybe it’s my soul. I often heard that growing up—I am an old soul.

Just like it did as a child, my old soul keeps me separate from my peers. I am outcast and I do it to myself. I want to be a person who reads and then comments on others’ writing, I really do, but the insanity of the internet is too much for me to manage. I am easily overwhelmed. On most platforms the screen is littered with links and advertisements for other related and important content that requires my immediate attention. My eyes are drawn away before the end of every sentence. What were you saying? Better start again at the top. I’d have to copy and paste your essay into Word and then toggle into focus mode to read it with any hope of comprehension. Even then I start reading it in my own voice which is too serious and desperately earnest before I remember that most people enjoy writing and try to have fun with it. Let me go back one more time and read it with fun in mind. First, I have to remember what it was like to be fun.

If I manage to finish reading (before one of those other links gets too loud or something in reality has called my attention—reality always wins no matter how alluring the internet content is) I’ve got to open the correct web browser and find your blog’s tab among the forty I currently have open, THEN… I have to type out a kind and honest comment that doesn’t make me sound like a smug a**hole or a suck up. I read and reread it a thousand times to make sure that it could not be received that way no matter what kind of inflection the reader applies. On second thought, better be safe and just hit the like button. Wait, do I like it? Is there any creative effort I wouldn’t like? Does that make a like the same as a polite smile these days? I like when I get likes but I’m also never sure they are from people who’s feet walk the earth so they also kind of don’t count at all. Is that how it is for everybody else?

What’s that word that means you belong in another time? Anachronistic. I looked it up. Sometimes I think this about myself. I think I am supposed to live in a time without the internet. I think I belong in 1992. All the modern conveniences of the nineties with none of the digital organization required today. I think there’s some brain quality that other people have that simply does not exist among my neurons. How are all of you consistently reading other blogs? I find one I like, I read a single post, maybe I click around to one or two more if time and attention allow, then I close the tab and it’s gone forever. Where should I be saving this information and how do I retrieve it later? Is there a digital notebook to store these things? How do I remember where that is? And how do I keep that organized? By Author? Subject? Mood? Is that what bookmarks are for? Is this knowledge I should have been born with?

I liked when we started the newsletters. It was helpful to get the things I liked sent directly to my inbox. I no longer had to go find the posts in the wild, instead they came to me. It was a glorious few weeks until I subscribed to too many and the internet overwhelm got jumbled in with my work emails and summer camp reminders. Things quickly took a turn for the worse. I don’t want to delete them because I do want to read it eventually, I just can’t right now and so they get buried in my inbox awaiting the magical day when I have fifty-seven hours of uninterrupted silence to read through them all. I could get through half of them at least.

Like so many other things, I’m giving up for now with the intention of picking it up again later when my life is… less. The optimist in me thinks that if I wait long enough, they’ll invent something in the meantime that makes content consumption more manageable. Maybe we’ll get one of those cords to plug into the back of our necks like Neo. Then I could learn what the Democratic establishment is saying about NYC’s mayoral candidate with some real efficiency. Catalogs of other writers’ scenic, vacation posts could be consumed in seconds. And think of the recipes! Yes, the neck cord is what I’m waiting for. Are the AI guys working on it?

I feel ashamed to admit that I don’t read the work of other writers like me. It’s not who I want to be. It makes me feel like a drain on society to hope my work is read without reciprocating regularly, but it’s also all I can realistically manage at this stage in my life. Maybe it’s the same way for everyone and I shouldn’t feel that bad. Writing is keeping me alive so that’s going to happen whether there is an audience or not, but I have to make strategic reading choices so I don’t exhaust myself. Consuming internet content is high output with a typically low yield. For now while my attention is easily hijacked, I’m sticking with my classic paperbacks. I recently finished reading Anne Frank’s diary. Is there is somewhere I can leave her a comment?

I have better luck with books. Weighty, neatly contained, and clearly titled books made out of trees that I can stack on a shelf and leaf through every so often. Books are real. Nothing on the internet feels real. You don’t feel real, my internet readers who occasionally “like” these paragraphs that I compile and obsessively reorder every Sunday. And also Wednesday this week. I tried a new thing. I sat in on a writing group where writer’s gather to talk over zoom and then take some time apart together to write. It’s supposed to be encouraging, and it was. I think the other people were real. They looked like real people in the little boxes on screen. I bet they all write fun, interesting things that I could be reading regularly if I knew what to do with the links they all shared. I should have taken screenshots of each of them to staple to the top of their posts when I print them out. The group was a small step toward the internet for me. I even turned on my camera so I could be a real person for them. If I participate a few more times, I might get to know someone well enough to leave a comment on their work and trust they’ll read it in the way it was meant. I’m proud of myself for wading into new waters, however shallow.