"publish and walk away": on what we keep, what we've lost and how we find ourselves devoted

Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web, Part 10 [The Finale] | Also: This newsletter is shifting as new dreams are being woven by this author—I hope you'll join me.

Hello gentle-people, 

This will be the last segment of the "Woven" series, though I have so much more to say. I hope this post helps you understand the heart of this series. 

I am in discernment about how I will use the information I've collected and there reflections I've shared in the future. I see it as an unfolding part of my vocation or call to consider a contemplative response to our digital media literacy crisis. No, it is not hyperbolic to consider it a crisis. 

Those who want to dig deeper, look no further than my reading list, where I have compiled the books I've read that shaped my reflections.

I am also sharing this gentle little note to say...

I will be pausing from writing essays on here, indefinitely. For awhile, it felt like I was writing to believe in my voice. I was writing into the narrow margins I could find where I could be believed by others. I was writing to support some other work I was doing (namely, a podcast). Writing this newsletter has helped me feel a lot more confident. 

It is with this confidence that I now embark on new literary adventures, which I will share more about soon. For now, you should know changes are coming. 

For some time, I've been afraid to make these changes, afraid people would pull their support if they weren't "getting their money's worth." I have no idea how to even begin to account for that. All I know is, the people who will continue to support me as I shift my focus know that I hope to share from a space of abundance. 

I have decided that I cannot do what I do artfully and intentionally unless I feel to move as slowly as possible. The algorithm, and even the rhythm I set for publishing most Wednesdays, doesn't support that. In this next season, I hope to deepen my awareness and grow as a writer beyond this medium. One of my dreams has been to be an author. I owe it to myself to put my effort into fulfilling that dream. As a subscriber, you are already supporting this dream.

What will this newsletter become? I will come to tell you what I am up to and share some #perchinglines (short reflections on words I've been resting on). Maybe some original poems, if I can part with them. And of course, I will let you know what I am reading.

I hope I have said enough about "a gentle landing" that you know what it is when you see it, when you feel it—when you long for it and it isn't there. But I hope you know I am not done collecting feathers for my own gentle landing, as my dreams—and nightmares—shift. 

But you should know—there are things I long for beyond a gentle landing. 

It seems my whole journey could be summed up my this quote by Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon: 

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

Seeking a gentle landing is a cyclical journey—there is always the arrival of new weariness. So I plan to keep collecting "feathers" here so that we can create the quills, pillows, and wings we need to land gently. 

[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.]

the original confession

“Today I’m struggling with confidence induced by Substack. I want to know my words resonate with my peers.”

—me, in the group chat

It all started on July 31, 2024, which was a Wednesday. I remember because my Substack posts are published on Wednesdays. I remember because I used to check my Substack periodically throughout the day when I publish. During this time, I was also very active on Substack Notes, which, if you haven’t explored the app, looks something like a Twitter feed. Notes can sometimes feel like the writer’s lounge of Substack. It can be a supportive place where writers share advice and uplift each other. It can sometimes feel like just the right kind of nerdy experience between writers who are also readers of each other’s work. Notes started to become a feature of this site I would check daily and contribute to with my own thoughts.

Over time, I started to compare myself to some of my colleagues on here whose work generate lots of comments on their posts and restacks on Notes. This comparison made Wednesdays my least favorite day in my writing routine. Every Wednesday was another reminder that I was not one of those writers.

On that faithful day in July, I shared this confession with two of my writer friends, who also have Substacks. The response of one brilliant friend met me like a blanket of deep care: Publish and walk away, friend. The words you write are not just for the folks here, they are for the future. For the generations after. For people not yet born. That’s how much weight they hold. Likes and hearts are ephemeral.

I responded saying I would make a little social media self-care guide for myself and add her advice to it. I had no idea I would journey down a rabbit hole that would reflect on months of reading, writing and shifting how I engage online, leading to this series.

All I wanted was to do better by my mental well-being. I did not expect to have completely reshaped my life online and my life offline.

what we’ve lost…

“If we are to restore and document our humanity, we must refuse the spectacle for the everyday.¹ The archive has privileged the spectacle to our detriment. Today we can chant the names of a handful of the dead, but these are not litanies for survival. Even community-based archives have proven woefully inadequate in recording the names suffering slow deaths of incarceration, poverty, and environmental toxicity. We must first seek to archive lives lived in spaces of impossibility.”

—Yusef Omowale, "We Already Are." Sustainable Futures²

I knew how I wanted to end this series before it began. I had written the final part months ago, including my original confession. I saved it in a knowledge management system I had been experimenting with, but somehow it disappeared and I can’t find it. So what you’re reading today is my best effort to recover what was lost and make space for something new. I suppose that is the heart of this series.

I took a day to sit with the weight of the loss—it was written so long ago, I cannot reconstruct it from memory. All I have are fragments.³

For so long, the archive for so many of us only contained fragments. I am thinking specifically of my skinfolk. For so many of us, when we reach back into our pasts to learn something about ourselves in the future, we are grasping at straws. So the idea of building archives in the present that make looking back a bit easier holds so much weight.

Luckily we can build with fragments. As you know, I love a good bird metaphor in this space. There are over 176 species of birds that weave their nests with twigs alongside materials they source from human trash.⁴ They are able to form soft places to land for their offspring from things that weren’t alive.

What I keep calling archival devotion⁵ can look like this; the preservation of the seemingly insignificant in the present with the hope that they will hold what we call precious in the future. We can look tenderly upon what has been overlooked, and Yusef Omowale says, “refuse the spectacle for the everyday.”

Don’t Do It For The Gram, Do It For The Archive

…and what we keep

Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.

—Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

I have just shared that I struggle with wanting my work to be appreciated by my peers. A desire for their feedback is embedded in the afterlife of each post.

I have just shared that I am impacted by the lack of response I must often sit with after I have published.

As I write, I hope this vulnerability doesn’t cheapen your experience of a gentle landing as a reader. It is true—I want you to take your time, lean in and return to these words as often as you need to. It is true that I want to center reflection and hope that those reflections continue beyond the comment section and into your daily living.

It is also true that my internal dialogue often sounds like this: “Am I doing okay? Was that post okay? No one commented. Maybe it sucks. Maybe I’m not making any sense. Maybe I should write less. Maybe they all find my emails annoying.”

I see a connection between being able to “publish and walk away,” and trusting in the work of building an archive. That work isn’t one that can be evaluated on the same day a post is published. The evaluation of my peers in the present, however kind or unkind can only go so far. Especially if I see the call to write into the future as one worth leaning into.

But what do I do about this desire to be “woven” into the story of something that matters, here and now? And how are you, gentle-people, a part of what I am weaving here?

This is certainly not a call for you to leave more comments to help me feel better on pub days. Throughout this series, I have pushed back against the idea that our being woven together has anything to do with engagement—it is more of an inevitable entanglement.

Engagement is fleeting but entanglement lasts.

The call I feel rising up in this series is one of examining our entanglements—the good, the bad and the ugly—and deciding what to keep.

My confession last July was a realization that I couldn’t keep up the practices that led me to experiencing so much dread when I share my writing. My hope is that by examining our relationship to social media, we might realize there are some things we can’t keep up. Some of it will be lost, but some of it we will have to learn to let go so we can turn toward keeping ourselves.

time travel

To get over the sting of losing my writing, I reached into my archive. I dug up an old writing archive from Evernote, which I used from 2010 to 2019. I read through old poems and blog posts from a very different version of myself. I even found a list of resolutions I wrote in 2014 for myself in the year 2030. I was surprised to see that I achieved many things on list I had never revisited until now.

In a Black women’s writing group I am a part of, I was led in a writing exercise to write about the year 2040. I did the math and calculated my age, realizing I’d be almost 50. I have never thought of myself at that age. To craft my response, I used one of Natasha Marin’s questions from Black Imagination, which we started this series with: Imagine a world where you are safe, valued and loved.

I saw myself as an accomplished⁶ writer, who had achieved many of her career goals, finally seated in her chaise lounge chair. I saw myself advising someone who is my current age, someone who came asking “tell me it gets better.” I readied myself to revisit my archives, to show this person I was once where she was—to prove to her there was more to life than that moment. After this exercise, I realized, with my highest imagination, I conjured a scenario where someone came to me for wisdom. Where I was able to offer it, seated in my softness. And the wisdom emerged from what I have kept.

I traveled forwards and backwards to fill the void left by my missing words. It all left me with this resolve:

To aspire to creating something that lives beyond this moment. To write, into the counter-archives. To nurture these dreams. To keep moving toward the softest version of myself.

terms of devotion

“Creatives should take social media metrics with a grain of salt, and focus their efforts more on community-building factors.”

— Matthew Prebeg, “‘A quiet shift is taking place’: On being a creative in the age of content”

I intended this section to be its own segment in this series. But the more I wrote about it, the more I found myself embarrassed by my hopes. What has shaped this embarrassment? Well, have you ever shared something you were really excited about with someone only to receive a flat, alienating response? You hoped you could have connected, with shared enthusiasm, over how great this thing that has enamored you is…only you are left feeling alone in your devotion.

That is what I feel, so often as a writer. Each word I write feels as if it ventures off to find family. I do not care to be in a conversation by myself.

“What we consent to—what we agree to—is the consent not to be a single being. It’s a kind of extra-social, non-contractual consent. It’s not the consent of the individual who stands alone. It’s the consent of entanglement, of inseparability, of having always been with.”

— Fred Moten

I am continually in awe of Fred Moten’s writing. I am particularly appreciative of the ways he moves through scholarship in community and collaboration. He is not interested in being in a conversation by himself, either.

This quote reminds me of the kind of community I want to be in. I am making community moves, inspired in part by a book I read called Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life by Radha Agrawal. I am making community moves, so that when I publish and walk away, I can join in conversation with those who have consented to living their lives to reflect this truth:

Engagement is fleeting but entanglement lasts.

I know this is true when I am not paying attention to the timeline and whether or not my writing is resonating with my peers (who are all likely overwhelmed by the multitude of good writing out there). I know it is true when revisit past words and I practice writing into the future.

I know it is true when I see your comments on this series—so many of us are trying to find our way through this digital media literacy crisis. So many of us want something better than the channels we currently have for digital social connection.

So many of us want:

our complexity back from branding
our self-worth back from metrics
our stories back from context collapse
our time back from timelines
our attention back from algorithms
our careers back from content creation.

And I want to make community moves—where I get to be part of setting the terms of devotion.

This series was born from that confession of insecurity, shared among confidants. Friends I made from a season of being online in another way I have changed. Somehow, this group chat formed because we knew we needed to be in each others lives in a way the algorithm didn’t allow for. Four Black women made community moves and exchanged phone numbers. Since then, I have been a participant in the joy, grief, humor, curiosity, hope and terror that has been shared in this group.

Our terms of devotion is simple: we long to embrace our softness, and named our group chat “Black Girl Softness” as a reminder of that.

Our words led us to one another, but there is a deep love that sustains us beyond what we can find words for.

It is exactly this kind of community building that has helped me adjust my expectations online.⁷

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

for the strangers

"I cannot remember the name or face of this stranger, but I saw him once. He looked thoughtful. I imagined he had a soul I could talk to. I walked home filled with the desire to know him, to talk with him for hours. I dreamed of meeting someone I could say everything to.”

— from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals

I remain open to the possibility, echoing my friend

Robert the contemplative

, that I haven’t met everyone I am supposed to love yet. Everyone who is going to love me.

The aperture of that openness shifts, as I account for the trauma I carry an the memories of times I was not met on the same terms of devotion. But just as Emerson recognized that he might have shared an inner landscape similar to the person he was describing, the possibility for a new soul friendship is always looming.

So I will end this series, remembering those who are strangers to me now—those I write for into the archive, with the dream of a response that comes long after I’ve (been) called. I write to the ones who have found space on this wonderfully weird web to carve out some kind of belonging.

Those who have, at least once, thought their connections online would not be taken seriously because they were…online. Those who have retreated here to find a sense of agency and voice through the muck of it all. Those who know that as complicated as the internet is, it is also a wonderfully weird place to connect with wonderfully weird strangers. Those who have come close to saying everything or anything (confessions included) to satisfy the desire to be known.

For those who will find these words on the internet, long after I have published and walked away—

Let us never diminish the care that can generate, even if others look down on it as a lesser form of connection. Let us reflect, gently on how we are being shaped by those connections.

Let us name its weirdness without diminishing its wonders. Because we, the co-creators of these connections, are also a little wonderful and a little weird.

Somehow we keep coming back here, finding each other and entering into something of a confessional through these words. Somehow we are woven, despite—and because of—the screen between us.⁸

landing track

The goal of landing tracks has always been to give you all a chance to check in with yourselves and your own stories as a place of rest. It is also to offer practices that might help facilitate a gentle landing.

Today, I offer only one: share whatver reflections you delight in sharing, as they arrive for you.

1. Emphasis mine. Hold this phrase tenderly if you can.

2. From this medium post.

3. Which includes an early draft, thankfully.

4. You can read up on it here.

5. First explained in this post through the posture “at your leisure.” Defined succinctly here.

6. Bare in mind that I get to decide what accomplished means here.

7. I want to shout out to some friends I asked questions to to help me write this piece. I wanted to know “do you feel like you know your readers?” We unpacked a bunch of things related to that question, including, of course, what our boundaries are around the connections we make online. It led me to the conclusions I’ve come to around the kind of community building I want to do in the future. While the invitations may come through this newsletter, I don’t see this newsletter platform as a place for the kind of deep community building work I want to do.

8. Do you see now why I had a confession in every post in this series? In case you know nothing of Catholic church confessionals, here is an explanation.