On Impact: The Big Win
If only the day of my birth had fallen in November rather than October, my post of deep, existential despair easily could have doubled as my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on impact, hosted by Alexandra, for reasons I’d hope are evident at least in retrospect if not entirely obvious at the time.
I’ve only ever contributed to a carnival once before, on digital relationships. That earlier contribution, in its own way, is about impact, although not in the way I intend to discuss here, inasmuch as it describes “the crucible in which I learned how to be online” and the foundations “of how I learned to be and not to be a person online”. Still, it’s relevant here if only because as my post of deep, existential despair shows clearly, I haven’t yet quite worked out how to be and not to be a person online.
What’s evident from my post of deep, existential despair and it’s unsolved and unresolved tension between the natural condition of wanting to be seen and Franny Glass’ trenchant and accurate dismissal of “ego, ego, ego” is that I’m anxious about leaving the world, when I do leave the world, completely unnoticed. It’s what led to my saying the following about my blog:
The trick will be figuring out how to make it last beyond me, when the time comes to leave something behind, so maybe the world will see me after it’s too late to matter.
(Yes, I’ve a bit come to view my blog and its ongoing project to restore two decades of writing as a sort of revenge from beyond the grave. I’m starting to imagine people years later stumbling upon it and crying, “Why didn’t we see this sooner?!”)
It’s not, of course, that I’ve had no impact whatsoever upon the world in my fifty-five years and thirty-two billion miles around the sun. There’s a list of what you could term impacts on my homepage.
- Hands Off! the Net (mid-1990s)
- The Millennium Cafe (late-1990s)
- Portland Communique (early-2000s)
- Can’t Stop the Serenity (mid-2000s)
- The Belmont Goats (mid-2010s)
Nonetheless, as my mediocre midlife rockets in slow-motion toward eventual dissolution—once my sole remaining source of family financial support is gone, my only options will be to live on the streets or leave my home of thirty years to live with a sibling in an area where I will have absolutely no independence whatsoever, something I’ve said in the past is the only thing that prompts even just a bare whisper of suicidal ideation—I admittedly find difficult the reality that for the most part in the present day I’m not seen or heard.
I’ve lost count of the number of times some issue or another is being discussed within the particular blogosphere circles in which I travel and I know with both ego and without ego that the ways in which I’ve had my say are more observant and better written than the ways in which others have had theirs, and yet theirs get the attention. I don’t know how to let that go. I just don’t know how to let that go, even as I know I should let that go. I don’t know how to say things in an impactful and artful way and yet at one and the same time accept that they have, and will have, no impact whatsoever.
Certainly, it doesn’t help that my post of deep, existential despair went completely unnoticed. Or, I should say, almost-completely unnoticed: other than my sister and my mother, it yielded exactly one response. Given the very nature of the post, that does nothing to make me feel like any of this is worth the effort. If nothing else, I suppose, that happenstantial topical absence of notice is deeply ironic.
(It’s with its own sort of deep and topical irony, as well, that today’s Timehop surfaced for me that one time I took a photo of my own ghost.)
Yesterday, I watched someone post something difficult to write and publish, going so far as to call it cringe. It wasn’t, to my own mind, although it’s possible that I grade on something of a curve because of some of the things I write and publish. What bothered me, though, as ugly as this is, was the degree to which their piece was paid attention. It was even called brave. Seeing all of that just made me feel even more unseen and unheard. It’s not that people should not have seen them. It’s that I don’t understand why people don’t (care to) see me.
None of this is new:
There’s a tension in a lot of blogging if you’re not some sort of niche influencer: hand one, you know you’re writing because you can’t not; hand two, you don’t want all your effort not to matter. You blog for whatever reason that matters to you, but how long can you go not knowing if there’s a reason that matters to anyone else.
It doesn’t matter to me that, say, my writing about the Yankees has no impact upon the world, although maybe that’s just because everyone already knows they suck. Is it just “ego, ego, ego”, though, to think that a post of deep, existential despair should make some sort of a fucking ripple in the world?
There was an obvious title for this post, but it’s already been used. In that case, it was another bit of my ongoing argument that catastrophizing, at least for my own presentation of my own particular neurotype, is an absolutely critical component of scripting for self-regulation, rather than a thing to be pathologized and dispensed. In some ways, my birthday post can be viewed as a kind of catrastrophizing, a flailing scramble to come to terms both with the fact that I want to be seen and with the fact that #FrannyWasRight. An unsuccessful attempt to resolve that tension in the light of having reached an age and mileage clearly indicative of being firmly and irrevocably on the backside and downside of my life.
I’d made mention in that post of having watched The Bear, and how perhaps the single most important thing I got from the show was this idea of just saying the word, “Heard.” In the show’s context, it was a way in the midst of conflict to just quickly acknowledge the other person and what the other person is saying. In my thinking, it’s a way not to have to fully engage with someone but still communicate to them that they are seen. That what they’re going through is seen. That their humanity with all its humanity both shared and distinct is seen.
The other day on social, someone in response to a critique of how we rely too much on political narratives that suggest an ultimate end-point or resolution (instead of recognizing that everything just continues to happen and the struggle is ongoing) referenced their deep appreciation for how the television show Angel ended, because it ended in such a way as to make that very point.
Elsewhere and much earlier in Angel, the titular character explains to someone that he’s “worked it out”.
In the greater scheme, in the big picture, nothing we do matters. There’s no grand plan, no big win. […] If there’s no great, glorious end to all this—if nothing we do matters—then all that matters is what we do.
It’s true that I believe this. It’s true that I believe there is no greater scheme and that we have to choose to face it with something other than and in place of a narcissistic nihilism. It’s why I believe that even just the small, everyday courtesies matter.
Nonetheless, when I post a deep, existential despair on the annual event of the day of my birth and it falls like a tree in a forest otherwise devoid of life—when it draws naught but a single and solitary, “heard”—then does what I do really matter?
Does it really?