A line went on an aimless walk

I stopped posting on instagram around the end of 2020, I didn't feel like I had anything to say, anything that I truly wanted to share with anyone. I’m sure some people probably felt the same way around that time, the global turmoil was palapable. So much was just caught in the wash cycle of life, things spinning so concurrently we were all pinned flat to the wall.

Before then, I found it pretty easy to publicize my life in my teens and twenties, I hadn't been alive long enough to tire out. Hell, social media hadn’t even been around long enough to feel as dated as it can feel now. I'm only in my thirties these days but I understand now what older people meant about "waking up tired." I wake up ready to start the day while also simultaneously wanting to erase the future from my present. In all the years of publicizing my life, I came to the sobering realization that I didn't really know "who" was living my life. It was just too hard to tell what “who” really even meant for me and for others. At a certain point, I wasn’t the person in my posts and neither were the people around me. In some ways, its great that things don’t have to be real anymore, life is real enough on its own without anything pretending to be like it. There’s a sense of power and mischief involved with being able to present whatever sort of illusion you’d like others to see.

I still don't think I really know "who" is living my life. I know alot about this "who"; what kinds of things they like, what they dream about and what they're afraid of but people are so much and so many things and it'll just always feel weird to me to try and encircle all those things with a fence and call it "Shantel the person".

The idea of starting a blog during the rise of all the different methods of social media seems either needlessly different or behind the times. Both and even more things are probably truly about it but I think I have finally admitted and accepted to myself that I don't want to partcipate in social media. But I am not without a foot in reality, I don't wish to be an island but more like something worth finding for those who have a desire to search. I’ve come to lack the desire to publicize, idolize or romanticize my life.

After all these years, there’s still more years to come, more things to worry about and more things to hope for. All the pages of the calendar fall off the wall in sheets, till the floor is either a hazard or a piece of art.