In Search of Creativity and Leisure in a World of Consumption and Scrolling
I deleted a majority of my social media accounts lately. Well, I tried to, in what turned out to be a comedy of errors. After deactivating my Facebook account, I spent the next week inadvertently activating it again and again after discovering how many times I’d lazily logged into a website using my Facebook credentials instead of creating a username and password.
Next came deleting Instagram off of my phone, only to find myself face-to-face with the embarrassing amount of times that I clicked the space where the Instagram icon once was on my phone, hoping to lose myself in another scrolling session, all while finding an endless list of things I “needed” to buy.
Many events and trains of thought have led me to the conclusion that ended with my escape from the Metaverse. But I think it has been mainly driven by my desire to create things simply for the sake of creating them, and to grow in my ability to be rooted to the present moment. A present moment that is currently full of toddlers covered in stickers and applesauce, and an eight month old who has mastered crawling. And let’s be honest, it’s much easier to scroll through curated images of Advent decor and read other people’s thoughts than it is to decipher what my newly verbal toddler is trying to communicate.
Apple sauce?
Upstairs?
Your guess is almost as a good as mine.
It’s not that social media is inherently evil. But I was worn out from the amount of thought I was putting into the perfectly curated post: the one that hit all of the paint points of my target audience while also providing them with an accessible solution, all presented with gloriously creative imagery and a branded font. So I found myself being drawn back to blogging.
Does anyone even blog anymore?
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized blogging might be a great creative spot for me to land on again. No word count limit. No wondering if someone was clicking “like” just because I’d found the perfect image to pair with my thoughts in social media. No “like” count getting constantly fed to me via notifications over on the ‘gram.
Does anyone actually call it “the gram” anymore? Have they ever called it that? Just me? Okay.
I was sick of finding myself refreshing my notification feed in hopes of more shares and accolades. I wrapped myself up in the statistics and branding so much that writing became a chore instead of something creative I enjoyed doing for leisure.
Then I remembered I had a blog. One I started way back in my senior year of high school, just as a place here on the internet to share my thoughts and connect with others. A place to create without a consuming worry about whether someone would comment on it or not. And given that a majority of the comments that have come through this blog in the past eight (eep!) years are kind reminders of my inability to spell restraunt, no, restaurant, I should be good to go.
So here she is, the resurrected blog. Unbranded thoughts, irregular posts. No custom fonts or fancy Instagram-esque images. And given my innate inability to resize pictures on Squarespace, probably no images at all. At least not ones in the correct proportion to your screen. You’ve been warned.
What will it look like? I’m not sure, and I think that’s part of the creative process of discovery. Most likely it will include some random thoughts and musings of a tired mom to two kids two and under. A lot of misspelled words, no doubt. But also the search for creativity and leisure in a world that push push pushes us towards consuming things at rapid speeds.
Maybe some long form essays?
Poetry?
Only time will tell.
In the meantime. . .
What I’m waiting for:
Sleep to finally hit my two year old, who is singing through the entirety of the Frozen II soundtrack in her crib right now. Between operatic “ahhh ahhhhhhs,” she is obstinately shouting “no naps me!” In other words, I might be waiting a while.
A gloriously sparkly dress that’s been lost in the deep underbelly of the USPS sorting facility a mere five miles from my home for the past few days. Will it arrive in time for the black tie event this weekend? More than likely, no. Will I be the best dressed stay at home mother on Monday morning? More than likely, yes.
A free evening in our schedule so that Joseph and I can continue watching “Only Murders in the Building,” our latest Hulu find. Can I figure out who killed Tim Kono before Inspector Clouseau, er, Brazos, does? Given that I only recently crossed Evelyn the cat off of my suspect list, the chances are low.
What I’m wondering about:
Why there is a corn tortilla splayed over the cover of my library book. More than likely the above mentioned sleep deprived toddler. That or I really am going crazy.
What to get Joseph for Christmas. I have a long list of options that are lovingly chronicled in my bullet journal, and one of the options includes this. Since he is one of the few (the only?) readers who have made it to this point of the post, hopefully he got a good laugh. The rest of you might be questioning my sanity (if you weren’t already).
How it’s possible that I’ve eaten this many chocolate coins since the celebration of St. Nicholas’ feast day yesterday.
The beauty of poetry. A friend of ours hosted a small poetry club on Sunday, with each person in attendance sharing (or reciting from memory!) a poem that struck them since the last meeting. It was slow, leisurely, and everything that today’s digital fast-paced world is not. Joseph and I were talking on our ride back home after the event that enjoying poetry takes time, focus, and a much longer attention span required from our phones. I can’t wait for next month’s meeting.
If you’re wondering, I shared this poem from Jim Moore that I’ll close this post with:
What It’s Like Here
It was nothing unusual. Just a woman, bare-knuckled
on a cold day, pushing an empty grocery cart up University towards hell.
You see it all the time on this planet of theirs.
I had been to what they call a movie. And I was what they call
happy. As you know, fate has given me a wife, beloved to me.
Yes, beloved is a thing they understand. Right now she is playing come
with the dog while I write this report. Sometimes she says to me,
“You are really from another planet!” I just hold my tongue.
There is hell around every corner here. There are people who are paid well
to ruin the lives of others. There are people strapped down
to chairs, then a button is pushed. Smoke rises sometimes
off their bodies before they die. I do not tell you this
to shock you, but because you need to know there are planets
where such things happen. Even so, there is happiness
of a kind you would recognize. Right now there is snow,
a thing that divides itself up into many pieces,
then falls from the sky until all ugliness is covered.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” people say and it’s not a question.
My question is, “Where do I go from here? What do you want of me?
Why was I born on this planet?” You’ll want to know, did I stop
and help the lady. I did not. And you’ll want to know
what does “beloved” mean, if not that. I don’t know. I only breathe
one breath at a time. Not like you who breathe so many lives
at once. We drove home, my beloved and I. The movie?
It was called Men of Honor, a kind of dream
of how things should be. We didn’t like it.
Nothing about it rang true. But we held hands anyway,
then went out into the bare-knuckled cold, described above.
Source: Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press, 2005)