Re-learning "community" - part II
A reader of my previous post provided feedback, and it helped me realize I didn't express my thoughts as clearly as I wanted to (also yay thank you for reading!). As I thought about how I could better make my point, more reflections surfaced, so here's part II.
Their feedback was (if that person would like to be credited, I'm happy to do so),
"This is noble, but monetising and business-ifying "community" and the need for it is not the way out."
My first reaction was defensive – I thought the very premise of my post was calling myself out for engaging with that mode, and believed I was expressing my desire to move away from it. But after re-reading my words, I could see that I hadn't rounded those points out very well. I tend to ramble, and I'm impatient with the process of translating my thoughts into words. I also recognize my "very online" knee-jerk reaction of "hackles up" was another mode taught to me by online spaces that I want very badly to break free of.
Reactivity, poor emotional regulation, gawd awful conflict communication. These are the symptoms of two decades of being "very online". When I noted in my last post that my work often told me I was "too intense", they weren't wrong. Twenty years of online discourse, "advocating", trying to amplify social justice causes... I was rewarded for being a dogmatic hot head. I retreated from The Discourse around 2016, a year after lowkey instigating a local "Me Too" movement in the Calgary arts scene. Trolls were everywhere, bot armies were beginning to swarm and my nervous system was wrecked. I "left it all behind" for my isolated prairie farm, and focused on building a life around flowers. In essence, I ditched, and this mode of reactive escapism is something I've since tried to monitor. My most recent move potentially being another obvious example.
In my defense, at that time I was a single mom who had a serious habit of biting off more than I could chew. For some personal context, I was raised in deep poverty with a volatile, abusive father. We were a large family, a mix of Syrian-Egyptian-Greek (dad) and Scottish-German (mom), my father was an immigrant who dealt with racial stigmatization and had no framework for navigating his mental illnesses. And we were Mormon. I left the church in my early 20s, along with my first husband. I also come from a "gifted" family, something my siblings and I discovered in our adulthoods. "Giftedness" is basically a jumbled mix of neurodivergencies and sensitivities, all wrapped around processing information more quickly than most. I didn't start therapy until my 30s, and through it I recognized most of my "gifts" had been channeled into surviving with no socioeconomic safety net. Now approaching 50, emotional regulation is still a challenge.
Which is part of why being online worked so well for me for so long. Online, where the rules of engagement were clearer, where I could communicate and engage safely. And in the early days, social media was a space where we played! Karaoke clubs, ridiculous photoshop competitions, riffing jokes – it was a party! But I was also loudly cautious about the evolution of our online social spaces, and it was around 2019 that it dawned on me there was no going back to those light and lovely days of early social media. So I withdrew and leveraged the skills I'd gained in nonprofit marketing and communications to build a business using online social spaces – spaces I recognized were transforming to favour marketing over "staying connected". I did not imagine they would eventually take the blatant, anti-human turn that they have.
Quick pause to acknowledge this is all very self-reflective, and I don't know how much of it is relatable to outside readers. Apologies for indulging in my own neuroses as I sort out "community" for myself. I will continue, because I find unearthing these reflections quite useful, and maybe they'll be useful to others.
If I could pinpoint one "gift" I have, it's persuasion. Persuasion through charm, authenticity, humour, and emotional resonance. Therapy illuminated the formative void I carried after a childhood of coping through escapism and emotional dissociation. I'm good at reading psychological patterns because I had to read my father's (and mother's) as a means of survival. I also have well-formed abilities in risk analysis, which have translated to a strong sense of intuition. I was ecstatic to recently find a paper detailing the neurobiology of intuition, a great read for anyone thirsty for a framework of intelligence outside the shallow measures of IQ. Anyway, those skills have lent themselves extremely well throughout my adulthood, when I realized I would have to cut my own path without a socioeconomic safety net.
I'm also high-energy, curious, and frankly, I live to have fun. Having fun is really all I care about, and I want so badly for others to have fun too. But in terms of making a living, marketing and communications are second-nature to me, and when the internet posed possibilities of "monetizing community" – though we didn't call it that at that time – I was well equipped to jump right in.
My gift of persuasion is also something I fear about myself. "Gifted" types tend to carry an innate sense of morality and justice, and thank god I got a bit of that, otherwise I'm sure there's a timeline or two where I'm just out there grifting. I have my father to thank for that grounding too – he was obsessed with fame, it was a sickness for him, and I resolved early on that status-based power was a poison. Any time I came close to holding real "influence" – as a comedian, advocate, or online entrepreneur – I steered away from it. From the outside, this looked like a bright passionate girl abandoning project after project, wasting potential again and again, but the truth is I just don't trust myself with any level of influence. No one is impervious to the highs of sycophancy and status, something we're seeing clearly as the grifter class has hijacked an entire nation.
Am I a coward? I haven't decided.
I leveraged my skills to survive in a system designed to grind us down, and it's been a lonely mode to exist in. I've of course forged real friendships and have been involved in "real" community, especially during the early 2000s and my involvement in the visual arts community, but the "real" community I crave now feels so rare as the online world of monetizing ourselves has become so dominant.
Yes, I want to build a livelihood that is autonomous from the exhausting neoliberal systems of employer-employee, and in that pursuit I've prioritized connectedness to the ecosystems of the soil, and by immersing myself in that pursuit I am learning that real-world communities exist as ecosystems as well. And they are being starved through the online coopting and monetization of "community", something myself and many others in my circles have participated in and is largely normalized. I feel a panic rising in my chest when I realize how far so many of us have veered away from knowing how to interact in location-specific, dynamic and messy communities. And that panic rises with the knowledge that our online social platforms are designed explicitly to retain us, silo us and divide us, and they're near impossible for some of us to leave. The entire social media experiment could be compared to the construction of the Tower of Babel – no one can understand each other anymore. Our social fabric is falling apart, yet we're trapped within these warped facsimiles of "community".
This all sounds very doomy, and it's where my head has been for the better part of five years. When I realized it was not only near impossible to detangle myself from social media, but that I'd also allowed so many of my irl social skills to atrophy while "building community" online, the problem took on an existential level of importance to me.
The reasons I left Calgary are varied and rational (from my perspective), and I will share more about them as this blog evolves. More than anything, I needed time and space to process. I needed to leave "survival mode" to be able to relearn how to engage in real-world community, and I wanted to go somewhere where those communities still thrived. Where I am now, my previous mode of "building community" online is both ineffective and unnecessary. I could put a road sign on my driveway and sell what I need to. I no longer need to leverage my business to access community, and that move was entirely intentional. I've plunked myself into a place where I must relearn real-world, non-monetized community in order to thrive.
My motivations for online engagement are no longer those of financial survival. I want to explore ideas, assist with filtering noise to find clarity in these raucous flows of online information. And I won't fool myself into thinking my perspectives are more valuable than those making the effort to engage. Yes I have opinions and my intuition leads me to some pretty uncomfortable hunches. I want to explore those here too. But I'm not here to monetize anyone. If my writing became popular it would of course be nice to get paid for it, but that's not my motivation for starting this blog.
And I still feel like I haven't explored notions of "community" as comprehensively as I want to. These posts will not always end with succinct conclusions or clear calls to action. I'm not interested in telling anyone how to think or feel. I welcome thoughts and feedback, and as we go I will do my best to unlearn the paradigms of "influence" that have so thoroughly saturated these spaces.
Onward we go.