Hi all, I’m going to be stepping back from tumblr at least for a little while, but likely for good. For a long time now I’ve found online communities difficult and frustrating places to be, increasingly polarised and steeped in cruelty. There are aspects of the culture on here (and online generally) that lack empathy, prioritise a sense of moral superiority over compassion, and disproportionately target minority and marginalised groups with puritanism based not in sincere critical thought but in groupthink and schadenfreude. I have recently found I can no longer stomach it.
I have been lucky in my online experiences, I have rarely been the victim of abuse or harassment, and while I like to think I don’t pull my punches, and am an authentic presence here, I credit this mostly to my own caution. I owe much to online communities for my career and my personal development, but this has often come at the cost of my mental health. I have been in the past prone to extreme anxiety and depression due to deeply unhealthy attitudes towards online validation. After a lot of work in both my personal and professional life I’ve overcome many of these issues and am far better now than I was a few years ago. However, this comes with a clarity of hindsight that informs what I feel now, which is that this is no longer a place I can exist healthily.
While I have worked to improve my relationship to online communities, I have watched them become more difficult to exist in than ever. I have watched friends, mutuals, and colleagues targeted by campaigns intent on ruining them; robbing them of their livelihoods, their communities, and their loved ones. The anxiety that I and many other creators have taken on in the face of this trend is a silent, exhausting burden. It has destroyed my ability to make art for fan communities I used to love, and annihilated any sense of safety or trust I used to have in these spaces.
Online communities were where I first found a sense of belonging. For almost twenty years now they have helped me grow as both an artist and as a person. They were a space I could belong when I had no where else. It breaks my heart that they will never be that again.
I’m not interested in debate, or in specifics here. This is something I have been considering for a long, long time, and as I am at a loss for how to mend this problem, I’m choosing to opt out. I give up. Consider me overwhelmed. The cost to my mental health is too high. My job, my home, my loved ones, my happiness; these are not things I am willing to give up for a few likes on a microblogging platform. In the coming days I may delete this blog, I may make it private, I don’t know yet – all I know right now is that I plan to never use it as I have done in the past. This can no longer be a place for me, as a person, to exist.
My final thoughts are these; be kind to one another, and mean it. Empathy and compassion are rare currency, but they are essential tools for growth and learning. They are not always comfortable – things that are good and right often aren’t. We live in a society that increasingly monopolises and monetises our comfort; validation is cheap and quick and convenient. It rewards our most base emotions and chemical reactions and muddies our ability to think critically or broadly. It is the opposite of growth, the opposite of healing.
My therapist recently told me to try running without my headphones in. I had told her that I hated running, but that I knew it was good for me, so if I distracted myself enough with music or podcasts, I could ignore my aching legs, my straining lungs, my brain screaming at me to stop. Her suggestion caught me off guard, I thought I had been doing well just to be running at all. “It is good that you’re running,” she said, “but there is value to paying attention to that discomfort, to being conscious of the work and how hard it is, and in choosing to do it anyway. It’s a skill. Right now you’re running, but you’re not paying attention, you’re not learning.”
We tend to think of morality, empathy, kindness, and compassion as innate abilities. As if they are things we should be able to do with ease, that if they feel uncomfortable or hard then they are not warranted. People often say things like “it’s so easy to be kind”, and I just fundamentally disagree. It is always easy to be cruel, always easy to be uninformed, always easy to ignore a problem; it is very rarely easy to be kind. Kindness when it really counts is active and unrelenting work, it is going out of one’s way to consider another person, it is always, always the harder choice. Just because you cannot see someone on the other side of the screen, does not mean they are not there. It does not mean you’re not making a choice when you disregard their personhood. I implore you all: pay attention, do better, be kind.
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