Splash No. 209 - Existing
Existing
I found a really dumb meme with a quote from Joker (2019) “For my whole life, I didn't know if I even really existed. But I do, and people are starting to notice.” For better or for worse, I’ve found myself relating to it a good bit. In the movie, the title character is getting noticed for committing crime wearing clown makeup, after living a life on the margins of society. Fortunately, I don’t relate to any of that. Instead, for a long time, I used to spend a lot of time trying to be seen online on one form of social media or another. For no reason in particular, I often felt alone and unseen, in a way that teenagers are wont to do. I believed that creating things for validation would leave some sort of mark on the world, let me be visible for a moment.
In my different accounts, I sought attention from others for my photography or my illustrations or my carefully worded yet hilarious tweets. And to some degree, I found it — getting a decent amount of likes and comments and praise and all of that jazz. And, as you’d expect, it didn’t feel like much and wasn’t worth as much. There were passing feelings of enjoyment and many great things came out of the connections made and the body of work I created, yet none of it ever affirmed my existence in the way I was looking for. Just as quickly as a photo was posted it was forgotten, replaced by the next, and the same was true for the feeling.
When I took a couple of weeks off from writing to decompress, I received messages from multiple readers of my work. One shared a short story that they were reminded of, another told me about how they rarely read other newsletter, and someone told me that an ancient piece I wrote on Medium years ago had changed the way that they thought. During a period where I was not writing a word or having a single writerly thought, my accumulated mess of words was still reaching people, offering something, even among the algorithmic rat race where words were plenty and disposable, even as I sat on the couch playing 2k for the fourth consecutive hour, even as I wondered whether I had any more to give, or if my newsletter was even worth writing.
I’ve spent time thinking about what a monetized version of my newsletter looks like. I’ve thought about what life would be like if I became a good enough poet to get published and write a collection. I’ve thought about a life where creating art is all that I do. And as interesting as those are, it’s just as interesting to consider a life where this is enough — where I continue to churn out letters to a few hundred people, with the archives reaching a few more. Even if I were to stop, the archives would remain, still capable of resonating with the frequency of a stranger’s heart. Knowing that these words could live on, I have never existed more.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - Honestly, Nevermind by Drake - I liked it
ARTICLE - "Brad Pitt Opens Up His Dream World" by Ottessa Moshfegh - “I consider myself on my last leg,” he says to me, “this last semester or trimester. What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?”
POEM - "An Annual of the Dark Physics" by Norman Dubie - "This was a consequence of her purity / And her all too human grief"
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Here,
Nikhil