On bringing something to the table.

It’s a common thing to say that “being on stage is a privilege,” meaning that if you’re going to get on a stage and demand the attention of people, then it’s incumbent on you to have something to say. And the amount of effort that your ask of your audience should be proportional to what you have to deliver to them (i.e., Anna Karenina asks its audience to go through a long slog of a book, but it has many payoffs for the reader, but if you’re going to throw something nightmarish and inaccessible out there, you should at least have some sort of payoff there if you expect any response other than hostility back at you).

These days, it’s kind of trite to talk about how we are all simultaneously on the stage and spectators, but there is some truth to it, as we each perform our microperformances. And I”m somewhat struck by this acticle that got published by the woman that ran Anacam. In particular, I was really disarmed by this:

“Mostly, that the driving impetus of the collective Internet is an all-consuming desire to say “hi.” I first noticed this when I was in my chat room (then called IRC, or Internet relay chat). At least 75 people were in the chat at the time and at least 15 different countries were being represented. Back then, I was still a bit of a utopian idealist! I thought this would be an opportunity to reach out to all those countries, all at once. I wanted to talk to Russia, Brazil, Ecuador, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Australia, and beyond. “

Let’s get all this bullshit clear and out of the way, I thought. Let’s melt all the toxic residue from the Cold War. But no one wanted this or seemed to understand what I was trying to do. “Wave to me!” “Do you see me? I see you!” was the unanimous cry I heard from my viewers. I realized then that basic human nature needs to feel it is seen and heard. In many ways, nothing has changed since then.

We all have this extremely powerful stage, and this extremely powerful lens that we can use to view nearly everything we want, but at the end of the day, we just want to feel heard and understood. I know that I personally, while I was out on social media, felt like I am constantly in dialogue with a vaguely defined “the consensus” and that I NEVER felt heard or understood, except when agreeing and getting vaguely validative feedback. There were times where I was wrong, and I was happy to have had my horizons expanded, but more often than not, I felt like I was yelling into the void, and the void was simply yelling back.

Which brings me back to here. I’ve opted out of a forum for expression that involves other people providing most of the content and into one that demands much much more of me. I’ve put myself on a stage, and now it’s time to have something to say. Feeling “not heard” isn’t enough, you absolutely have to both have something to say, a perspective with which to say it, and the ability to turn it into something coherent. This will probably be my last “meta-blog” post, but for those of you sticking with this, thank you for reading, and I’ll make myself worthy of being here soon enough.

❤ ❤ ❤ Dahling