Splash No. 149 - Who will you be?

Who Will You Be?

I’m obsessed with a very particular type of article going around the web these days — the ones that try and give some sort of guidance on the people we’re going to be after a majority of us are vaccinated and we enter into a phase of relative normalcy. Some use research about people recovering from trauma to offer guides, like the piece from The New York Times entitled “You Can Be a Different Person After the Pandemic” while others, like The Cut’s “What Will Be Cool This Summer?” offers prognostications of the future from a lens so deeply colored by internet culture that it’s utterly incomprehensible. And somehow, this Cut piece feels like the most incredible piece of performance art, representing the unknown combinations of the strange changes that everyone may have gone through in the last year. Never before has such a large amount of the population been so intensely engaged with the internet, and the results are yet to be seen. 

Personally, I’m starting to lose touch with how I used to remember the past. I remember July 2019 as the month I hung out with my coworkers for my birthday. I remember December 2018 as my trip to Europe with my family. Recently, I grew emotional when I realized that a TikTok sound I loved was nearly a year old — an invented landmark to try and break up the incomprehensible passage of time without experiences with other people to shape them. Regardless of the content of our conversations, no Zoom call or gaming session will ever be enough.

I’ve always spent most of my time on the internet, but this year has been something else. For most of my post-adolescent life, my friendships have always originated from the internet, but they were the best when they could leave their glowing screens. An online relationship was so much better when the online was just a component, rather than the whole. In college, I made tons of friends through Twitter, and I did the same when I lived in New York and San Francisco. We would find shared interests on the internet, message some, and eventually meet up, continuing our friendships into the real world. 

But now, all of my friendships are online relationships, sometimes for better but usually for worse. As I watch Billions with my parents, I find myself gazing deeply into these characters’ eyes, growing familiar enough with their personalities to recognize what they’re thinking and feeling based on their expressions or phrasing or body language. But now, I can’t remember the expressions of the friends I have spent the most time with in my life. Even as I try to picture them, it’s hard to think of them as more than their names on my phone, our text threads, the memes that we share, the emojis they favor.

I realized recently that most of the people I talk to regularly don’t live in San Francisco, and that I don’t fully know how the people I do know in San Francisco are doing. While I’ve experienced the last year closely with some of my friends through texts and calls, I have no idea what many of my local friends have experienced and wonder how we’ve changed — if we’re still people who will get along, or if we’ve changed too much.

And so, maybe I’ll take the advice of the NYT article and be a different person after the pandemic — someone who won’t forget their friends’ tendencies, someone who is a bit more extroverted, who can make new friends easily, and just as easily make the memorable experiences I have been missing so much.

Drops of the Week
 

• EP - "ALL YOURS" by Rental Vhs - awesome EP by a local SF electronic producer

• ARTICLE - "The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence" by Merve Emre - really interesting article digging into the origins of the phrase "emotional intelligence" and how it was misused to promote neoliberal ideologies.

• BOOK - The Prophet by Khalil Gibran - incredible work of art

With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
 

Donate to Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta Mutual Aid Networks

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Constantly changing,
Nikhil