21 min
The Subject, The Object and The Artist: Toxic Positivity and Self Sabotage on Instagram. Going Gray in Tinseltown
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- Fashion & Beauty
Going Gray in Tinsel Town: The Subject, The Object and The Artist People keep sending me messages telling me to Be Positive. One message I got today was a link to an article about how difficult it is to be disciplined with your optimism.
I didn’t read it.
I am starting to feel disdain for people who tell me to think positive and look on the bright side. It feels manipulative. Like something they want me to do so they can feel more comfortable. There are a few people who reach out to me with their messages of positivity. Some are practical, but mostly they feel weighted in judgement and fear. Their happiness feels aggressive and judgemental, and I resent it, because, ultimately it doesn’t feel like they are really listening to what I’m saying or writing.
Although I am expressing my emotions in a public space — I’m not asking to be fixed. I am exploring this experience of shedding my self-objectification and self-surveillance through social media as I grow out my naturally grey hair. I have turned aging into an experimental art exhibition, happening in real-time so you can experience it through me, and I can go back and watch what happened with curiosity to my days-younger self.
I am deep diving into this experience because it is my experience that I can not change my behaviour or attitude just by focusing on a new behaviour or attitude, I need to bring that unwanted behaviour or attitude into the light where I can look at it and see it for what it really is. In most cases, it is just F-E-A-R (False Evidence Appearing Real). In this case it is fear coated in the icing of a societal idea of who and what I am and who and what my value is to the world. This has caked (pun intended) my thinking with ideas and philosophies which are not mine. I can’t just wish them away, or turn toward something else that is more positive, I have to call that shit out for what it is first, figure out if it even belonged to me in the first place, stand up to it, and then, like the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, and every other well developed bully in literature, it will disappear. But I definitely can’t try to manage the fear or keep it in check it while I’m expressing it, or I won’t get a clear shot at it, and, based on this weird feedback on Instagram, I’m assuming that what people are seeing looks like someone who needs encouraging messages, a great deal of external validation and lots of emojis.
The thing is — that external validation is what I am trying to cure myself of. For me, the thing that makes me feel better is just posting. Well. Not posting. Posting feels gross. But it feels less gross than feeling lonely, and the external validation makes me feel temporarily connected, and provides a sense of intimacy that I don’t get so often in my everyday life.
I’m definitely triggering people.
The biggest thing I’ve realized through all of this self surveilling and self objectifying and posting and looking at likes and messages and detaching and taking breaks and taking 600 selfies to get one and then feeling depressed cause it’s not a selfie taking day because my hair looks like shit, is that, it is just all f*****g predicated on how lonely I am most of the time.
My father once said that one of his favourite lines in a country song was ‘at the times I felt the most alone, someone was sitting right next to me.’
The person sitting right next to me now — is me; the instagram version.
The process of exploring my aging as an art experiment has me as The Subject, The Object and The Artist. In this case — the subject is my body, the object is the selfie, and the artist is the one asking all the questions. Part of this exploration means toggling back and forth between these three positions, working on not judging any of them, figuring out where they intersect, and then, taking a step out of them and determining how each is growing and changing through all of this.
I’m
Going Gray in Tinsel Town: The Subject, The Object and The Artist People keep sending me messages telling me to Be Positive. One message I got today was a link to an article about how difficult it is to be disciplined with your optimism.
I didn’t read it.
I am starting to feel disdain for people who tell me to think positive and look on the bright side. It feels manipulative. Like something they want me to do so they can feel more comfortable. There are a few people who reach out to me with their messages of positivity. Some are practical, but mostly they feel weighted in judgement and fear. Their happiness feels aggressive and judgemental, and I resent it, because, ultimately it doesn’t feel like they are really listening to what I’m saying or writing.
Although I am expressing my emotions in a public space — I’m not asking to be fixed. I am exploring this experience of shedding my self-objectification and self-surveillance through social media as I grow out my naturally grey hair. I have turned aging into an experimental art exhibition, happening in real-time so you can experience it through me, and I can go back and watch what happened with curiosity to my days-younger self.
I am deep diving into this experience because it is my experience that I can not change my behaviour or attitude just by focusing on a new behaviour or attitude, I need to bring that unwanted behaviour or attitude into the light where I can look at it and see it for what it really is. In most cases, it is just F-E-A-R (False Evidence Appearing Real). In this case it is fear coated in the icing of a societal idea of who and what I am and who and what my value is to the world. This has caked (pun intended) my thinking with ideas and philosophies which are not mine. I can’t just wish them away, or turn toward something else that is more positive, I have to call that shit out for what it is first, figure out if it even belonged to me in the first place, stand up to it, and then, like the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, and every other well developed bully in literature, it will disappear. But I definitely can’t try to manage the fear or keep it in check it while I’m expressing it, or I won’t get a clear shot at it, and, based on this weird feedback on Instagram, I’m assuming that what people are seeing looks like someone who needs encouraging messages, a great deal of external validation and lots of emojis.
The thing is — that external validation is what I am trying to cure myself of. For me, the thing that makes me feel better is just posting. Well. Not posting. Posting feels gross. But it feels less gross than feeling lonely, and the external validation makes me feel temporarily connected, and provides a sense of intimacy that I don’t get so often in my everyday life.
I’m definitely triggering people.
The biggest thing I’ve realized through all of this self surveilling and self objectifying and posting and looking at likes and messages and detaching and taking breaks and taking 600 selfies to get one and then feeling depressed cause it’s not a selfie taking day because my hair looks like shit, is that, it is just all f*****g predicated on how lonely I am most of the time.
My father once said that one of his favourite lines in a country song was ‘at the times I felt the most alone, someone was sitting right next to me.’
The person sitting right next to me now — is me; the instagram version.
The process of exploring my aging as an art experiment has me as The Subject, The Object and The Artist. In this case — the subject is my body, the object is the selfie, and the artist is the one asking all the questions. Part of this exploration means toggling back and forth between these three positions, working on not judging any of them, figuring out where they intersect, and then, taking a step out of them and determining how each is growing and changing through all of this.
I’m
21 min