look at me look at me looking at me: on performing vulnerability online

Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web, Part 7

Hello gentle-people,

I hope you know your attention is valuable. I write these newsletters hoping to honor and respect your attention as much as I do my own. I grow nervous, sometimes, to share on Wednesdays, especially when I produce long reflections like the one below. But recently some friends shared with me the impact of my reflections in this series has had on them. Their encouragement was not to mind the Substack post editor that taunts me with its message that says “post too long for email.”

Those encouragements helped me to breathe a sigh of relief. I present these words in the spirit of that sigh, with the hope of a gentle landing.

[If you want to share with me how this series is impacting you, feel free to express your thoughts in this survey. I would love to hear from you.]

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Early 2021, when we were still “bored in the house and in the house bored,” I got loud on the internet. Louder than I have ever been. I thought I had found my voice online, sharing a deeply vulnerable journey of learning to be a soft Black woman on Instagram and Twitter and eventually a podcast. People seemed to be listening, responding to me with likes, comments and shares. Here’s a post reflecting on that journey two years later, in a post now archived on Instagram:

[in the photo:]

“I got loud on the internet bc people kept talking over me irl. I got tired of being the token black girl at the table, on the stage, or in the sermon rotation. It feels good to be building something that I’m not forced to edit for the white gaze.”

[in the captions:]

As I learn more about the Black imagination, the Black interior and Black literature, I wonder why l ever thought centering BIPOC in justice work was not possible. Centering white people cost me a lot and I have only offered the edited and depersonalized version of those stories online.

I'm reading Michaela Coel's "Misfits," and she says " The term 'misfits' takes on dual notions; a misfit is one who looks at life differently. Many however are made into misfits because life looks at them differently..." I am a misfit in so many ways. If you thought I was loud on the internet in the past year, you'll have to brace yourself for what's in store. I'm not self-editing anymore: not for the white gaze, not for the male gaze, not for the gaze of the church I once longed to embrace all of me— You're gonna have to find another token.

—March 15, 2022¹

This was an intense form of public vulnerability with a tone of defensiveness—a resistance to being silenced and an intimate knowledge of the forces that would wish to silence me. This is the work of translation as survival. It felt like it was me against the world—us against the world when I consider the audience of Black women I was writing for/with. My words held a desperation to be seen—yes they were having an impact on others, but I was reflecting in public. I look back on my words from that time now and I see it: I was over-explaining myself to live. I see it now. Did anyone notice then?

Am I being too hard on myself? After all, it’s just Instagram. This is just the way so many of us talk online, speaking to everyone and no one at the same time. Bearing our souls—or some illusion of it. I was just one among the many, telling the truth “raw and unfiltered.” Some might say I was on fire—and all I wanted to do was point a finger at who started it.

the wound and the scar

I recently came across some advice to write from the scar and not the wound. It was given in the context of publishing books written for the sake of advising others. Let me first say that I find that binary extremely unhelpful. I would prefer a spectrum, where we acknowledge that as soon as we are wounded, we begin the process of scarring. Our journeys of healing are seldom as clean cut as the simple advice conveys. Our work through trauma, hurt, and grief can often be so cyclical that we uncover new wounds all the time.

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those who have been wounded. Those who access language as their saving grace to describe their condition in such a way that it opens up the path to healing—for themselves and others. My favorite examples are mystic writers.²

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those who would reject this advice because it so squarely centers an individualistic journey of healing, focused on the resources of therapy and time.

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those whose embodiment requires they write from the wound to testify to their realities. Let my writing be a witness. Let the writing of so many of my friends and ancestors be a witness.

This advice stirred something in me and it is not because I fully disagree—no, there are some things we can only do well when we have healed enough and gained some distance. But it reminded me that there are those who would reject how I wrote then—and even how I write now—because my healing journey is not linear. Luckily, I have a view of healing, informed by studying disability justice and theology, that rejects the legibly embraced in this advice and honors pain as a way of knowing. My view of healing also rejects the pathologizing of emotion, which I additionally find support for in the journey of going mad without losing my mind,³ which provides generous room for mistakes and asks hard questions about who actually gets to be well.

In my work here, I hope to invite you to witness the ache. What is still aching in me and in the world. It may awaken an awareness to the ways you are still wounded and the ways you are beginning to scar. But know this: it will never ask you to perform a perfect healing journey. You do not have to be well here to say “well, here.”

Am I taking this too personally? After all, it’s just a newsletter post, meant to help writers like you grow. Maybe there is merit to this advice. Maybe you should edit out your processing and only publish your conclusions. Maybe being a bit more polished will help you succeed. Maybe you should turn the wince into a smile.

John Baloyi, “Reflection 1”

who look at me?

I have said this series will be lined with confessions. In fact, I don’t consider a piece for this series to be done until I have identified the confession that anchors it. I wrestled with this one for a long time before I felt I was able to write about it with any measure of compassion. Well, here it is:

I muted a friend.

I muted my friend because their displays of public vulnerability held the promise of being unfiltered and unedited. The confessional nature of their posts amplified by a public platform invited a tenderness that filled me with secondary embarrassment. I muted them because it felt like the hidden message of their posts was to disparage any kind of curation. I muted them because I was responding to this feeling of disgust that came up for me whenever I read something like what they posted. Speaking to everyone and no one, they offered unprompted perspectives on their internal reflections and insights about the world around them. I felt the strand of self-defense that ran through their words—I knew they were not defending themselves from me, but it felt like they were confessing something to me in a whisper that was amplified in a room of thousands.

I muted my friend and was left with this feeling that bugged me. I am now realizing that I was muting a version of myself. The me that used to routinely open up social media and share in a similar fashion. The version of me I have let go in the months since changing my relationship with social media and taking increasing amounts of time away from it.

While I explored my Instagram archive, looking back at that version of me, I found a post that spoke to this one:

[the picture]

“Stop shaming people for wanting to be seen. Instead ask why we live in a society that conditions us to devalue, dehumanize and look past each other.”

[the caption]

“We have to decide our attention isn’t cheap. And choose to tend to the things that matter most.”

—Jan 22, 2022

Part of me knows my friend wrote what they wrote because they wanted to be seen. And in some ways the platform that amplifies their voice forces us readers to confront how they have been dehumanized. Their sharing said “Who look at me? Who see me…” and “look close…I am Black, alive and looking back at you.”

What was my response as I saw this plea to be seen amplified by these tools for social connection I am now actively critiquing? I looked away. I descended down into rationalism, knowing the frame and filter spoke to me more loudly than their words did. I clung to an interpretation of their words that offended me, as someone who is growing increasingly conscious of the unrelenting frame and the unfilterable filter that is placed on everything we write online.⁴ The medium is the message,⁵ remember?

Look at me look at me looking at me. Seriously, look. All self-reflective and sh*t. I feel proud and you should, too. Some part of me won’t feel okay until I know you do.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs ““What do you know in your lungs and in your bones that can’t be diagrammed?”

look at me look at me looking at me

An early version of this post was going to focus on performative authenticity, context collapse, virtue signaling and meta-narration fatigue. On some level we can also point back to the post on branding and see a connection there with self-disclosure reinforcing a way we want to be seen. All of these I feel would have been good for helping you see the frames and filters that come with public vulnerability online. But an awareness of my own journey and a more generous reading of my muted friend led me to consider how a sense of voicelessness shapes this conversation. The more I explored my ideas, read and let that feeling about muting a friend bother me, the more I realized it mattered where I looked.

Afterall,“We have to decide our attention isn’t cheap. And choose to tend to the things that matter most.”

I have decided these social media platforms don’t matter to me but the well-being of my friends does. And some of my friends more readily share insights into their internal world with people who may or may not care. Some of them have yet to question the impulse that shapes their desire to do so and some are even uncritical about the world that grows cold in the face of their deepest concerns. So I find myself confronting the impulse of others to be vulnerable in posts, at least with my friends, with a measure of care and critique.

Remember my “I could care less” series? If not, just remember this: I recognize I do not have the capacity to carry this empathy for every stranger on my timeline. So I stopped looking at my timeline altogether. Sometimes when I log on, all I see is people responding to questions I didn’t ask—and someone them feel like they are yelling (at me). It doesn’t matter if its not true. What is true usually is that I don’t have enough context to know how to receive so many of these pleas to “look at me look at me looking at me.”

I know they want someone to care. I know some of them are spilling over with their truths about themselves they want the world to read. But my thumb scrolls past their words quickly out of habit and my eyes which dart around the screen, overstimulated. It all feels like too much. It was. It is. I was. I am?

---

“You were never too much.
Maybe someone told you
You were not worthy of love —

Maybe you believed it.

They could not wrap their minds
Or arms
Around you — as concept or person—

Enough is enough:
There is love
Beyond the collapsed self
you’ve forced into the folds
of weak love.” 

— January 19, 2022

---

the right to opacity

It is incredibly human for us to want to be seen. There was something inside me that raged through a desire to be seen. It rages still, know that so many find themselves muted in real life as their vulnerabilities are ignored and diminished in the face of peril. These folks find themselves tiring of what Raquel Willis calls “the visibility trap,” the intense contradiction that comes with telling our stories with diminishing returns on the justice and equity our lives demand. Sometimes our increased visibility leads to more violence—we say “look at me (look at me looking at me)” and the response is sometimes a gaze through the crosshairs. We whittle ourselves down to digestible nuggets, forsaking the complexity that is our birthright with the hope that we can squeeze into a narrow definition of love. But as Toni Morrison says “thin love ain’t love at all.”⁶

I may not have the capacity to respond to every plea to be humanized, but I know the very exhaustion I feel because I can’t is an indictment on cultural and systemic failure. I wish I did not have to X-ray my heart to prove I have one to a certain audience.

I wish so many of us didn’t need to explain or over-explain ourselves to survive. I wish for the expansiveness of our internal worlds. I wish for a hope that encapsulates what Édouard Glissant calls the “right to opacity” which affirms that our ways of being can evade simple definitions and explanations. I wish for that same home towards the peace we find in what Kevin Quashie calls the “sovereignty of quiet,” which calls us into a way of love that “descends into the interior” in a way that embraces the unknowing and forms us in a love that is both “the practice and the prize.”⁷

Visibility is not the same as kindness. I have been visible but unseen and unmet in the truest form of myself. There is more mystery to me than I can know. I am more un-narratable than I am aware of. There is only so much I can do to guide people’s conclusions about me.

the sound of the genuine

There is in you, something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in your self.

Nobody like you has ever been born. I didn't say, thank goodness. And no one like you would ever be born again. You are the only one. And if you miss the sound of the genuine in you, you will [be hindered]⁸ all the rest of your life.

…[…]…

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible then for me to go down in me, and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. And the wall that separates and divides will disappear. And we will become one, because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

—Howard Thurman⁹

You cannot look someone in the eyes through a screen and I hate it. I hate it because I have formed so many relationships with folks that I sustain through the internet. I hate it because, very often, it is when I meet someone and hold their gaze that I feel met in my truth. But some people, for various reasons, cannot or will not look you in the eye—culture, ability, preference or a sense of shame has made it this way. So in more ways then one, we must figure out how to be woven through a slight disconnect.

I want to acknowledge the limits of the internet. The limits that come with seeking out the kind of connection so many often seek when they share so vulnerably online. But I hope, if the idea of being “woven” means anything to you, let these words from Thurman serve as a guide. For me they are a reminder to show up for those I love with care and tenderness—even when we must “see” each other through an indirect gaze.

These days, I don’t write much to convince anyone of my humanity. I also don’t need as much convincing as I used to that there are those who see my humanity. As I look back on my words from 2022, I see a commitment to be “loud,” and refuse “self-editing,” as a means of creating closeness. I was reaching out with the tools I had at my disposal.

I am still here and still writing. Still finding my way towards more liberative language every day. I do so now knowing when I showed up wanting to be seen, I am. When I show up wanting to be heard someone says “I hear you.” I am no longer speaking to everyone and no one about what is unfolding within me.¹⁰ There are days when a new self-revelation dawns and it now has a place to live in my journal and on my journey with those who I trust to hold them.

I feel released, like I can go quiet and I won’t disappear. I can go quiet and I won’t be alone. There is a home within myself and it is safe to live there.

Landing Tracks

1. Have you ever muted someone online for oversharing? How did it make you feel? What does it say about the limits of (y)our capacity to hold other people’s performed vulnerability?

2. Maybe you are wondering if you are sharing too much. Take a step away from the platform and consider who you want to be in conversation with. Find one or two friends who can hold your reflection. Record a voice memo for yourself or journal to process your thoughts. Then decide if you still want to share it publicly.

3. Have you ever had to over-explain yourself to survive? Where do you go to release that sense of duty? Who sees you beyond words? Who shows up to offer you rest?

4. Global majority, queer and disabled folks: What does it look like for you to embrace the sovereignty of quiet? Where do you see yourself operating out of resistance (or saying instead of leaning into aliveness?

5. How are we constantly looking past each other online? What would it take for us to listen to the sound of the genuine within one another? Is that possible on these internet streets?

1. The comment section was jumping. Honestly, there are times, when I am losing in my relationship to toxic growth, that I miss the kinds of responses my work used to get when I was writing like this.

2. Some of you already know how I feel about the mystics!

3. Which of course comes from this book, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jarelle Bruce. Here is an affiliate link for it if you want to check it out.

4. It is all performance and that is not necessarily a bad thing, but it must be acknowledged as such. In my humble opinion.

5. This is a quote from Marshall McLuhan, cited a work I’ve mentioned here before called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. That book, along with others in this series can be found here.

6. This is a quote from Beloved, which I read last summer for the first time. It won’t be my last.

7. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, p 102. You can listen to me quote the section these terms come from on this bite-sized episode of Black Coffee and Theology on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Here is an affiliate link for the book if you’re interested.

8. I replaced “a cripple the rest of your life” with “hindered the rest of your life.”

9. Listen and read to Thurman’s full address here: https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/838

10. If you’re thinking, “But Rose, what is this newsletter?”—you all are not everyone and you are certainly not no one. You are the gentle-people. For me, writing with that framing on my words has helped me make this statement true. I will write more on this soon.