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I turned twenty-seven on July 16th 2012.

That was ten years ago today.

If you’ve spent enough time on social media you may already be aware of something called the ten year challenge. This meme usually consists of sharing a present day selfie next to a picture of yourself ten years younger. The goal seems to be demonstrating visually just how much you’ve changed. While I am also participating in this activity at the time of this post, I’ve had a lot of time to think things over in the last few months before turning thirty-seven this year, and I have decided to make this into an opportunity for self-reflection beyond the limits of social media. I am using this as a catalyst to launch a new home for my writing, permanently accessible at the address: blog.ejm.name

My aim with this site is not to write posts for views, or to build any sort of an audience beyond social media. My only goal at this time, and the reason I have decided to create this platform now, is to have a place to really put my brain on display as a writer for the benefit of my own mental well-being. To lead by example, and push myself harder to support positive creative outlets online. I need to force myself to stop keeping everything locked inside of my head, and to redirect my need to spill my guts into walls of text toward healthier outlets like this. Even if, as I expect, I may end up being my primary audience. The reality is, I need to do whatever I can to stop suffering in silence amidst the character limits, algorithmic suppression, and harmful habits that modern technology is instilling in all of us. I need to stop censoring my thoughts and my voice within the pressure of apps and social norms that are detrimental to my mental and physical health. To bridge the gaps in my soul where social media and the world around me falls short.

Anyone who knows me best, knows that I am silence incarnate. I despise talking. I would happily go through my entire life without speaking if I knew I wouldn’t be judged, ignored, and persecuted for it. This does not mean I have no desire to communicate, nor does it mean that I’ve got nothing to say. It simply means that I have spent most of my life compromising just to get by. Writing is my native tongue and the one medium that most adequately captures my voice. Every time I come back to it, I am reminded of why I ever clung to it in the first place. It is the single location where I exist and thrive most completely as a living being. While I continue to experiment with art in endless variation, I will always be a writer at my core, and I simply cannot continue to neglect to nurture this part of myself.

While I have become fully immersed in Instagram’s platform over the years, it is not without its constricting elements and unforgiving design flaws. Among those being a character limit for captions on posts, that I could exceed in my sleep. With my own website I will be able to simply be my unfiltered and unabridged self, with no apologies or compromises, and no expectations of engagement. There are no comment sections, no tracking views, likes or followers, no character and word counts. This is merely a place for me to exist as a writer and artist in totality, independent of all the artificial necessity that social media places on content and creativity. I can be imperfect here. My content can be flawed and incomplete. I can be inconsistent and unheard. I can be random. I can be a painting, a punchline, a useless conglomerate of sentient flesh. I can just be a fucking human being again. I don’t have to limit myself or perform for an audience of ones and zeroes. I can say all the things that I know deep down I need to hear. I can just be me and throw spaghetti at walls until I find out what sticks. There are no numbers to look at, just me, my creativity, and my future. A funhouse mirror to my existence.

In our modern world, where everyone is expected to follow the same social media rulebook I honestly think everyone could benefit from creating their own version of an outlet like this. Ultimately, I have come to realize I need more than I will be able to find through social media, both as a writer and as an individual. I need a place where I can force myself to really take a hard look at my life, and go all in on saying everything I want to say without feeling an inclination to change my approach to fit some kind of predetermined and performative expectation of success. I need a safe space, to post with a purpose I have to conjure within myself, without the synthetic drive of seeing my numbers go up on the internet.

Unlike journaling in a notebook, there is a vague accountability here that I think still has value without being too overwhelming to live with. I am posting this online, but without having to see its effect on an audience, I will be forced to write and create for myself rather than for others, and I think that is a drive that I have been feeling the absence of far too often in the social media numbers game. I want to feel the humility again of posting without gaining anything from it other than the inherent value of creating it, and saying things that I haven’t had the opportunity to say anywhere else.

I don’t want to keep living my life relying on algorithms that have the capacity to obscure and manipulate what I write and create to feed some external mechanism. My writing is infinitely more important to me than social media success. It’s not enough to keep hiding behind apps. It’s time for me to step up and feed the monkey that’s been riding me for as long as I can remember. I’ve been scribbling in notebooks for years, but we live in the 21st century and there are more effective ways to keep track of information, and to delve into your own mind, than letting that content be stored away in boxes filled with slices of dead trees. I am getting older now and I am unwilling to continue to suppress my own voice to appease societal norms and expectations. So here we are.

Welcome to EJ’s Mind.

This is going to be a resource, where I and anyone who is curious enough can go to better understand and explore me, my creativity, and what it means to be a writer in our modern technological world. It will contain whatever I can dream up in the coming months and years. It will include elaborate and introspective works of prose like the piece you’re reading now (#writeitout), as well as purely creative abstract and poetic works (#rhymeswithreality), original works of fiction and possibly visual storytelling (#storytime), somewhat detailed behind the scenes and analysis of my own “art therapy” and media production processes (#process), posts featuring my art and potentially options someday to purchase items (#arttherapy), original music maybe including early looks at new tracks/demos too rough for other platforms as well as artist discovery/appreciation posts and playlist updates (#musictherapy), info about ongoing and future projects/events (#projects), and maybe even some deep dive revivals of past works and experiences (#throwbacks). There will likely be many more surprises to come as well in the future. In the end, this site is meant to be transformative, it will evolve over time to accommodate my own needs and goals so long as I can be inspired to continue with it. If it still exists 5 or 10 years from now, it may be where you will go to access and read the graphic novels and animated stories I plan to make in that time frame; alongside my own music videos, and whatever content I can produce as I continue through college for music, animation, and business, while building on my extensive experience with writing, digital art, and filmmaking.

I’m not going to pretend to know my future, but I am going to show you beginning with this post how much my past has influenced my present and allow intuition to guide me on this journey of discovery that began so long ago. Today we’ll start things off by going deeper down the rabbit hole. We will be looking back, to better understand how I got here; what the future holds, and examine a life lived, in my own unique take on the #10yearchallenge.

By 2012, Facebook had really perfected its technological domination of mass consciousness. I had been engulfed in the site for years, and it had in some ways become my whole life. It was at this time Instagram came onto the scene as this fresh take on social media. I can’t remember why I joined Instagram all those years ago, but it was an endeavor that was likely fueled by boredom and a growing lack of perceived value in spending all of my time on Facebook. I had been in love with photography for much of my life, and the idea of an app that specialized in visual content seemed like a perfect fit. Naturally, I did not abandon one for the other, but I am sure a part of me wanted something more out of my online experience, and Instagram showed up at the right time for me.

This was a pivotal period in my life. I was nearing the end of my twenties and had been feeling a real sense of aimlessness for many years. To be fair, it was a sensation I had experienced most of my life. A general lack of direction that I feel was really cemented in me sometime between elementary school and high school.

When I was very young, it was easy to know what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to create. I was obsessed with the fantastical stories I saw in VHS movies and on cable TV. I was fascinated by music and video games, and utterly convinced I would grow up to be an animator for Disney. I drew all the time when I was young, and even came up with my own characters and the vague child-brained semblance of stories. But I grew up in the 90s, well before the modern internet. The future looked different back then.

For a kid who just wanted to spend the rest of his life making art, the world was a hostile and unforgiving place. The public school system failed me, both literally and figuratively. I found out I had a learning disability. I was diagnosed with ADD. Creative opportunities in my education slowly evaporated and everything else felt like a lot more work for no reward. Going through school stopped being fun for me at a very formative age and apathy set in. I grew more and more jaded to the institution of education, and ultimately stopped believing it would ever bring me closer to my dreams.

By seventh grade I felt like I had nothing left to care about in school. Grades meant nothing to me. There was no prospect of college in my youth. We were poor, and I had a lot of siblings. I came to believe that I’d never achieve my dreams through education. I found myself enduring a slew of lifeless classes I didn’t care about and sometimes wasn’t equipped to handle. My grades tanked, and I didn’t have the capacity to care. School felt like this hollow distraction. Going home everyday and immersing myself in TV shows, movies, games, computer programs, and music videos on MTV, all felt infinitely more meaningful to me than any assignment or lesson school had to offer.

So I tuned school out. I completely lacked the enthusiasm to apply myself. I just kept going through the motions, knowing it would all be over someday. But something else happened as all those years went by. I grew up.

I had felt like my energy was being wasted in school on things I didn’t care about for so long. I knew I needed more out of life, but didn’t know what or how to find it. I had a very small group of friends throughout school, but I was an introvert from the start. I only grew more isolated as I aged, and eventually gave up on having meaningful social interactions with anyone, save for a couple of my closest friends. I knew how hard it was to find people who really got me and seemed to genuinely care, so I stuck with those who did and didn’t bother trying to fit in anywhere.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that somewhere along this road I found my way into writing. I always struggled with focus. Reading was a major challenge for me, and I still struggle with it today. Lessons were hard to follow and information was difficult to retain and recall. I am a visual learner and the system just wasn’t cutting it for me. Homework often felt impossible. I was well on my way to failure at a very young age. I don’t know that I had any natural talents growing up beyond art and computers. But as the low-tech school of the 90s stopped including art in the curriculum I became more anxious and hopeless. In spite of this, there were these teachers throughout my life that looked out at all our little faces and said fuck the homework and lectures, we’re just gonna sit here and force you kids to write whatever you can conjure up in the classroom.

I’m sure I struggled with it at first, but at some point something in me clicked. Even as the world around me was in chaos, when I got to stare at a blank piece of paper and create, it was like I was that youngster scribbling away with crayons again. They had given me back my canvas. In those crucial moments when nothing in my life made sense, and everything in school felt meaningless, writing was my salvation. It was how I got to exist again. I felt like I had really found myself for the first time in my life. It was through this medium that I gained control of my life, when nothing else worked.

As the years went by, I lapped up every morsel of creative writing that school had to throw at me, while continuing to struggle in every other capacity with school. I couldn’t care less about homework and grades, but as I shifted ever inward in my lifestyle, it was those small moments of serenity where I got to live between pages, that I found the meaning in life I had been looking for all along. I began to embrace who I am as a writer. To this day it is one of the only things in my life that makes sense to me when nothing else does.

It was my first creative writing class in high school that really sealed my fate. I moved to a new school in my sophomore year, and kept to myself. I talked to almost no one. When I showed up in creative writing I was always excited. I poured myself into my work, and when we started to get into poetry I felt like I was already fluent in it. I don’t know if it was natural talent, or the fact that most people at that age weren’t as invested in writing as I was. After all, they didn’t need it, they opened their mouths when they had something to say. I didn’t. One fateful semester, we were thrust into a slam poetry event in class. So I wrote the first piece I would ever speak aloud. Nervous as fuck, I got up in front of the class and performed.

My mind was kind of blown at this point. They fucking loved it. I thought, wait, I thought I was completely irrelevant here. I was a ghost, a fly on the wall. I got to be invisible. To hide in plain sight. I didn’t want to open my mouth. I liked being a ghost. But all of sudden, my writing gave me this other outlet. I could be who I am, but still have a voice. My words could resonate with other people as much as they did for me, and that’s when it clicked for me, that this was special. I knew I was a writer, but now I knew more than that. My writing could actually matter.

I graduated high school in 2003, barely scraping together the credits to do so.

For the next several years I was a very solitary creature. I journaled and wrote sporadically. I was depressed a lot of the time and turned to poetry to channel what I was feeling. I had learned to turn darkness and pain into beauty and that helped me through a lot of it. I spent a lot of time distracting myself with other hobbies. Gaming, movies, HTML, graphic design, digital art, MySpace, and music. This is when I really dove headfirst into listening to and exploring a wide range of music. I discovered many of my favorite artists and albums and started to really build a listening repertoire.

I had no worthwhile experience with musical instruments, but I desperately wanted to make music. I had mini tape recorders lying around for the next decade, and I would just vent my own vocals and melodies into them whenever I was feeling overly emotional. Eventually, I did try my hand at school again. I took an English 101 class at a community college, and it was a pretty influential experience for me. Being back in school was interesting, but college in particular felt like a very different beast. I started to believe I could pursue an education again, unfortunately that all came crashing down soon after.

I was taking Psychology 101 and my mind was expanding. I began to experience fantastical thinking and started losing touch with reality. I experienced a mental breakdown midway through the quarter and had to drop out of college. I was kind of adrift for a while after that. I returned to my hobbies and wrote sporadically. At this time I had composed a fair amount of fiction and was starting to feel more ambitions. I even began working on a graphic novel, starting with early pages in a sketchbook, and later in prose. But I tapered off.

I was really loving writing fiction at this point, and found my way into another community college to explore it further. I had a fairly successful quarter of creative fiction writing and produced a lot of good work. Then I went on to take a screenwriting class, but I hadn’t realized I was on the same path that led me to crash and burn the first time.

I became increasingly inspired and eccentric, I became Manic. I got less and less sleep. Then I couldn’t sleep at all. I tried to keep going to school, but I was completely out of it. Reality melted away. The world around me became a hallucination, and I couldn’t fix it. I went for a full week without sleep, and lost every anchor I had to reality. My mind slipped into oblivion and nothing could pull me back. I got on a bus, and ended up somewhere I never should have been. I found myself in jail, completely out of my mind. It felt like I spent an eternity in that cell. I went to court and the charges were dropped. I got out, and went into an inpatient facility for treatment. I became medicated for the first time in my life.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. I spent the next week remembering what sleep was, and trying to get my life back. I gradually became stable again, and eventually went home. But everything had changed for me. My whole world had crumbled before my eyes. I was so inspired and convinced I knew what I was doing with my life, but it had all led me astray. I didn’t know how to do or believe in anything again. It felt like the last year wasn’t even real, like I had made it up in my mind, and every bit of creativity and progress I had experienced was a lie.

It took me a long time to move on, to feel like I could even dare to be creative again. My writing was not my enemy, but it felt like a dangerous and scary option. The good news is that I was medicated, and I was becoming more stable over time. I was receiving outpatient treatment, and slowly getting my life back. I was on disability and managing my finances. I moved out of the house and got an apartment with a sibling in Shoreline. We lived there for a year, and I got to spend a lot of time alone in my room, rediscovering my own creative capabilities.

I pushed more heavily into digital art and photography with my DSLR. I created a card game from scratch and printed it out so it was playable. I started writing again, with brand new stories. I was making progress. But I felt stuck. I had a limited income, and our situation wasn’t ideal. I knew I didn’t want to stay another year. Staying felt too easy. It felt like a waste of my potential. I had grown too complacent, and I felt like I was holding myself back. When it came time to renew the lease, I walked away. I didn’t know where I would go, I just knew I needed to push myself to seek more out of life.

I ended up moving in with a relative in Port Orchard. For the next year I continued my recovery, and tried to figure out what was next for me. I took a lot more photos and really got into editing them. I felt stable again. I felt like myself. The person I had lost was coming back. I finally felt like I could have a future again, and being behind the lens felt like the best path to getting me there.

Eventually, I enrolled in some creditless Digital Photography classes at Olympic College in Bremerton, and the rest is history. I found my way into their Digital Filmmaking program and completed it over the next several years, going through both the Associate and Bachelor’s degree programs. I rediscovered my purpose, and began building a future for myself again.

But let’s take a second, and backtrack just a bit.

We were talking about Instagram earlier. As I mentioned, I joined the service in 2012. Let’s re-examine that timeframe in light of everything I’ve now detailed about my experiences. While the first picture I ever posted on Instagram was (very appropriately) a photo of a cat, my second post was this one from exactly ten years ago today.

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This photo was uploaded this photo 521 weeks ago. This feels like a lifetime. The caption says it all.

“I’m 27 today. Not sure that means anything, but it’s a reminder that I don’t have forever to achieve the kind of things I want or need to. One thing is clear, it’s time to make some changes to ensure that I’m making the most of my time on this earth.”

This is my ten year challenge in a nutshell. Let’s put things in context. At the time of this post I had just started using Instagram. I was on the heels of starting treatment for my Bipolar disorder, had been living on my own for the first time in my life, and was starting to feel the urge to make more out of my existence. A few months later, I walked away from a nice apartment and a stagnant life in order to push myself not to settle for less than I deserved.

Over the next ten years I began to find my way back to who I really am. It has been a long and challenging road, but it has been filled with intention and purpose. The sentiment featured in this post is the same sentiment I have today. Yet, scrolling up through the ~863 posts following this upload, you will see a life unfolding with this drive for something more at its core.

A lot has happened for me in the last decade. I will likely cover some more specific details in future posts, but for now I just want to acknowledge what this journey has meant to me. Silly as it may seem, Instagram has played a big role in my life since this photo. It has for me served as a canvas for my own creative expression through photography, art, and writing the entire time. It has been a motivating force, pushing me to examine the life I’m living, and shine a light on what recovery from mental illness actually looks like. But it’s more than that.

My ten year challenge is to stick to my guns and not let go of that drive for a better life that I had all the way back then. Part of this is to really recognize that complacency kills.

I was medicated all through film school. From 2010 to approximately 2020, I had been taking medication everyday. At some point, I lost my doctor, and I didn’t follow up to get a new one. I went unmedicated for two years. After film school I started working, and everything seemed to be okay. I had a good life. Had an apartment that was comfortable and I settled. But I wasn’t really doing what I wanted to be doing with my life, and I was suffering.

From 2013 to 2020, I participated every year in Seattle 48 Hour Film Project competitions. They had become hallmarks of my directing experience all through film school. In 2020 I was unmedicated for the first time in a decade, and my mental health was already deteriorating. I participated in an at home version of the 48 Hour competition and shot a film with my housemates, but didn’t finish it and never edited it. I participated in another 48 Hour after that as well, but quickly realized I no longer had the mental stamina to handle the intense pressure of the time-constraints. I had intended to direct one every year since my first in 2014, but 2020 put an end to that. Since then I have been weary about going back into filmmaking and have been able to re-evaluate what the medium means to me.

Film school exists in a bubble. It is very much independent of the film industry. It is very easy to make a film in film school, and with the people you meet there. It is very difficult to make a film within the industry, without the friends you meet in film school. It’s just the way the system is set up. It is very hierarchical in nature and if you are going into it, you are expected to start at the bottom and stay there for the rest of your life until you are able to steal the spotlight from someone else. I ultimately decided that I disagree with the industry philosophically, but I’ll touch on this again in the future, when I have more time to get into it.

Needless to say, it was through the 48 Hour competitions that I had found a way to keep making films outside of school with my friends from college, but it ultimately wasn’t sustainable due to my own limitations. We rarely got them in on time, and whether we did or not, everyone suffered in the process. I was medicated and able to remain stable enough for years to do all these competitions, but I was also hypomanic. This means I was experiencing a milder form of mania that allowed me to tap into the sometimes limitless energy and creativity that comes with mania, without completely losing my footing in reality. The problem is hypomania isn’t sustainable long-term either.

I was scrambling all throughout my education in film, and missing so much of what was going on around me. The 48 Hour competitions were a big reflection of that. I have burned so many bridges with unpleasant productions that were hampered by me spreading myself too thin and taking on more than I was equipped to handle, because I could do it without flinching under the effects of hypomania, but everyone around me still experienced that chaos that my brain tuned out. As a result I don’t have many close friends left after working with dozens of people on countless film productions and producing a lot of great work together. That’s part of the cost of mental illness. If you don’t take care of yourself, you will eventually pay a price.

Cut to 2020, I’m out of school and working. Not thinking about filmmaking as a realistic goal anymore, and just passing the time. Video games, streaming, music, whatever distractions worked to get me through the day. Over the next two years, however, being unmedicated tore me to shreds. Everything in my life just got harder and harder. My emotional stability was stripped away day by day. Music was literally the only thing holding me together. Had I not had Spotify in my ears at work I don’t know that I would have survived for even a few months after going back to work from the covid lockdown.

In 2021, I was falling apart by the end of the day regularly. It was at this time I started turning to my art as an escape from the harshness of everything around me. I used the process of making digital art as a mechanism for channeling my emotions and distracting myself from my suffering. After a particularly hard day last year I was crying on my bedroom floor, and was so fed up with not being treated like a human being that I took a picture of the tears rolling down my face just to prove that it was real.

I then opened the photo in an app I had recently downloaded and started editing it. The result is this photo, which I posted on Instagram in May of last year.

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It was at this point that I realized what this process meant to me. I discovered that I could use my art as a form of therapy to help me cope with my mental health challenges and to channel my emotions into beautiful things like I had done all those years ago with my poetry. Having spent several months prior to this following more artists on Instagram and flooding my feed with beautiful visuals, that had ultimately led me to the app I was now using (Glitchlab), along with having a new phone to use (Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra), I was actually equipped to really dive into art therapy on a daily basis. Having been inspired by other artists in my feed I eventually took on the “everyday” challenge as a form of art therapy.

As I got into the habit of making a new piece each day, the writer in me came back. While I had been creative with captioning for a long time on Instagram, it wasn’t until this point that I realized I could use it as a platform for writing poetry again. So I transitioned. Everyday I would make a new work of digital photo art, and write a poem to accompany it. It became my lifeline last year. I kept experimenting and tried my hand at 2D animation for the first time in October, then I started jumping on my computer every night to compose one minute tracks in Cubase to accompany each piece.

In December, I started recording my lines and combining everything together. I started to feel for the first time in my life that I had the tools to start making my own music. But December hit me like a truck. I was working overtime like crazy, and I was exhausted. The everydays became impossible to tack on to the physical limits of my energy, and I had to stop. I put up the last one on Christmas, and logged off.

For the next several weeks, I took a hard look at my life, and began to really think about what I wanted for my future. Having gotten a taste of it, I knew I wanted to keep making my own music and to really push myself into taking it seriously, but I knew so little about music production and didn’t know where to start. Nevertheless, it had become clear to me that the only things that were keeping me alive at that point were music and art therapy. I was beginning to melt down at work on a daily basis. The anxiety was debilitating and I became incapable of doing the work. I knew I would have to leave, but was so uncertain about what it would mean for my ability to survive. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay rent, and that finding another job I could survive in my unmedicated state was going to be next to impossible.

I experienced one of the lowest points in my life, and saw no way out. I was moments away from acting on my suicidal thoughts. One night I couldn’t take it anymore, I decided I wasn’t going to go back to work no matter the consequences. The next day I had a bad experience and felt trapped. I didn’t want to be alive in that moment. I had a plan, but didn’t want to go through with it. I knew there had to be a better option. I reached out to a family member, and asked if I could come over. I left my apartment in Bremerton and never looked back.

I came home to Seattle, and slowly got my life back.

I got an actual psychiatrist and a therapist for the first time since I left the area in 2012, and was back on medication for the first time in two years. I’ve been slowly creating a safe space for me to have the future I really want here in the same place that first photo of me on my Instagram was likely taken ten years ago. But I have lived a lifetime since then. I have learned so many lessons the hard way. I know now that I cannot take stability for granted, and that I have to put my own well-being first if I’m going to be able to live the kind of life I want to live.

I don’t just need stability in my life, I need sustainability. I can’t keep throwing away years of my life in between moments of immense growth and progress only to come crashing down when my mental health degenerates into oblivion. I have discovered the things that are most important to me. Music and art are a big part of that, and I continue to push myself further into both. But my writing is something I have been neglecting for far too long. After composing around 150 poems since I started them with everdays on Instagram last year, I have become well-acquainted with Instagram’s character limit for posts.

I never bothered to memorize the number until I started working on this post, but I now know that Instagram will not let you post anything with a caption that is longer than 2,200 characters. I don’t know what the character limits were in the past, but knowing that this is the limit I have been subjecting myself to over the past ten years, as Instagram has been the primary platform for my creativity, I am now questioning how much I’ve actually been tapping into my potential as a writer, and how much I've been suppressing my abilities without justification. To me these character limits are often not enough to display what I am really capable of as a writer. I’ve also dealt with character limits on other platforms and messaging tools. But that hasn’t really stopped me from trying to say the things I feel motivated to say, even when they’re likely to be ignored, in the many instances in which I’ve mismatched my desire to write with inopportune conversations.

Doing some research for this blog I also found that most “experts” claim that you should never write blog posts greater than 2,000 characters for the sake of your readership, and I suspect it’s ideas like this that have influenced the limits on sites like Instagram. But I just have to stop and take a moment to ask, what the fuck is everyone talking about?

When the fuck did we put a limit on writing? Since when has self-expression been censored so absolutely at the source. So what my choices are to piecemeal my writing into carefully packaged morsels that can be quickly digested in one sitting, or write and publish a book? Where is the in-between? Where is a writer supposed to just be themselves without filter and conformity? I get that there are more platforms out there specifically designed for writers. Medium seems like a great app in my experience. But I feel like it’s not enough.

I feel like we are living in a society that now prioritizes shallow and meaningless online interactions that offer instant gratification at the expense of genuine experiences and limitless creativity. If anyone is actually reading this, I expect you know what I’m talking about. Who out there in the modern age of the internet is going to sit and write a 50,000+ character blog post, when the world is telling us it’s not worth it? And I can only assume that in doing so, not one will read this. But you know what fuck that! Why are we holding ourselves back, just because the world now behaves this way?

I’m so tired of having to choose between being a writer and using modern social media. If this isn’t content that the system we have today can accommodate, then I say fuck the system. We all deserve to be who we really are. To put our lives on full display, without reducing ourselves to a narrow stack of memes and stories that exist but may be wholly inadequate ways of capturing and representing our true value in life.

I want a better world than this for all of us. I want to see a heartfelt 30-page diatribe on their existence by closest confidants and passionate strangers. I don’t care what the algorithms demand. I don’t care that no one today wants to sit for 30 minutes on a single webpage without being entertained by some artificial stimuli. I want people to be people again and not have to care about the rules of engagement.

After posting 220 consecutive art therapy everdays last year (and many others in-between) before coming to a screeching halt as my physical limits were exceeded to keep up with the expectations I had for myself, I realized it wasn’t just about following the trend, and sticking to the objective for me. It was about pushing myself to do more of what mattered to me than I had ever done before. It’s for that reason I wouldn’t trade the time I spent on all that creativity for anything, but at the same time, it became unhealthy. It became less about me making things, and more about me meeting a deadline, and that in my experience does not make for a sustainable future.

We all need to decide what our own pace is going to be, and we need the flexibility to change it at will. We need to be able to stop doing everything. To slow down. To unplug from the feeds and the endless availability of infinite content from infinite sources. We need to be able to sit at a keyboard, listening to post-rock, and writing for days, to say the things we want to say, without having to care if anyone will ever read our words. That’s not what it’s about. We can’t just be here to show each other what the small glimpses of our lives we put online say about us, while ignoring the depth and nuance of everything we’re leaving out. The suffering, the horrors, the inconsistency, discontinuity, the broken, fragile, and vulnerable whole of our existence, that newsfeeds and 15-60 second cell phone videos will never fully be able to render.

After some deep introspection, and some sporadic time away, I came back to Instagram and posted this in February.

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As much as art therapy has meant to me, it is my writing that I have been longing to return to for far too long, and I do feel that it is modern day social media that is suppressing people like me from remembering what this medium really means to us. 

The caption I put on this photo is: “We’re forgetting what the window stole.”

That sentence has not left my mind since I wrote it. 2,200 characters is not a life. It's a window, but if we're not careful that window can turn into a lid on our coffins.

What I’m trying to say here, is that there is a whole world of creativity and self-expression that we’ve all just decided doesn’t matter anymore, because it’s not easily quantifiable into bite-sized homogenized portions and “posts” that are easily aggregated into newsfeeds. Maybe I’m out of touch with what the majority really wants, or maybe media is becoming something outside of our own design, and we’re no longer the ones in control of our own lives as artists, storytellers, and human fucking beings.

I know this is a hot take, but I feel like Social media is a dying medium. I feel like it is built on unsustainable and self-destruction attributes that are now causing it to implode in on itself, and it’s taking our humanity along with it. I know this sounds like an alarmist viewpoint, but that doesn’t make me wrong.

If you have not seen it, I highly recommend the documentary film “The Social Dilemma” as well as the podcast “You Undivided Attention". These are both products of a group called The Center For Humane Technology, founded by individuals who worked in tech and saw first-hand how our apps were being designed to distort our experiences of reality and manipulate our animal instincts to maximize engagement for profit. What is clear after you really understand the technology behind our everyday experiences, is that it is not prioritizing our mental well-being, it is actually neglecting it and in many cases outright hurting us, and there’s really nothing we can do to stop it from within the system and apps themselves.

If all of our experiences online and in life are relying on maximizing our engagement with whatever screen is in front of us, independent of what is on it, and what we really hope to get out of being online, what are we even here for? Are we little more than eyeballs attached to credit cards, with our humanity simply being an obstacle for the algorithms to overcome? It makes no sense to always be surrendering our autonomy to this inhuman, technological self-censorship that removes our agency over our own voices, and pressures us to live less of our lives offline in order to feed the machine as it were.

I believe it is imperative now that each of us find our own spaces to be who we really are, whether that be in the real world or online. It is no longer enough to expect to achieve what you want in life solely through the apps and tools available to us on social media. We are all compromising on our futures for quick fixes, and get-rich-slow schemes. I don’t know, maybe I’m just bitter that I would ever have to stop myself from writing more because a machine says no.

The reality is, I'm just getting tired of censoring myself for no reason. Of not having somewhere to turn the filter off and go all in with my writing. I'm tired of holding back. Of having any excuse at all not to write and to say the things I need to say for my own well-being and peace of mind. Part of growing up is letting go of old habits and dead ends that keep you from making it beyond every brick wall that has shut you down in the past.

I am at an age where I need to be able to koolaid-man my way through obstacles, and just keep moving forward. Because I am running out of years to recover from every missed opportunity and derailment. I'm tired of looking back, and seeing how much my past is repeating itself. I'm tired of reaching these summits, where everything seems to click just well enough for me to become complacent and abandon future progress. I need more from my existence. I have felt this way time and time again throughout my life. In the past 10-15 years I have found myself staring into a notebook page again and again, trying desperately to "figure it out". To crack the code on what my writing means to me and why I keep turning my back on it.

The truth is, I need a motivation beyond myself. Maybe I always have. I just struggle to see my reality from first-person. I need a mirror. I need something to make me feel like there's a bigger picture to my life, and that there's a reason for me to take this step back to examine my personal and creative world through the lens of self-reflection. Somehow over the course of the last decade, Instagram became this soul lens for me. It gave me an outlet to show the world what my life looks like, and to keep trying to push myself into a better world than where I started.

I'm now approaching 40 years on this planet and I can't afford to keep going through life without putting on my big boy pants. I need to grow up. Social media is in a crisis state. The architecture of these platforms has become so exploitative and profit-driven that it's filtering out what actually matters to us, and we don’t even see it happening anymore. We are at the whims and throes of reckless algorithms that serve the solitary purpose of quantifying the human experience into ones and zeroes to generate endless profits for companies and individuals. These paradigms are no longer sustainable.

None of us are as watered down, as superfluous, or as purposeless as our technology makes us feel. We lost something in all these character limits, engagement strategies, and viewer retention schemes. We lost the ability to just be ourselves. To be wholly broken and flawed, and uncertain every moment of our lives. We forgot how to be unpopular, unlikable, unpolished, ugly, and wrong. We traded our sense of personal autonomy for this artificial fame casino where we're all jonesing for a taste of the new currency. Where all it does is keep us gambling our lives away to acquire something that was never real to begin with. There is no more figuring life out the old fashioned way, we just go with the flow. Post what the app tells us people want us to post, and don’t create what doesn’t serve the architecture of these altars to our new gods. We could be doing more with our boundless creativity, but we’re all reducing ourselves without gain. I don’t want to subject myself to it anymore.

Technology isn’t the only thing to blame for my failures. The truth is, I have always struggled to write as much as I feel like I want to. It’s a matter of motivation. I have a hard time being creative without some kind of mission or bigger picture objective. At the same time, I struggle with ideas that are too big for the short term. I struggle with walking away from something and coming back to it with the same level of enthusiasm I needed to want to do it in the first place. It’s a habit I’m working to change, and I am hoping this site can be a part of that shift for me. I have wanted to write books since I was a teenager, but never felt like I had the capacity to sit that long staring at a word document. In spite of this, I have scribbled enough fiction and non-fiction into notebooks, and written enough scripts, over the years that it could all be published and printed in tomes if it had any sort of cohesion between it.

Ultimately, I need something in between a novel and a blog post. A place to air out my ideas and flesh out my visions, without having to know the beginning, middle, and end of every story or opinion before I write a word of it. In truth, what you’re looking at now is very likely the only way I will ever be able to write a book. Piece by imperfect piece.

What has become apparent to me in recent years is that it’s really hard for me to not say what’s on my mind when I am writing. This is incredibly problematic when I know I’m communicating in an unhealthy way with people who ultimately aren’t going to listen and really have no reason to. So I am starting to learn that if no one is really listening to the things that really matter to me, the least I can do is say what I need to say on my own terms. With this outlet I can learn to use writing to channel what I am feeling again without having to think about character limits and who it is for. At the end of the day, I know this is for me, and if anyone else happens to be so inclined to work their way through these words, I only hope I am worth your time. But if I’m not, that’s fine too, because if I’m here I’m writing, and I know that will never not be worth my time. If nothing else, let me be an example for anyone reading this, that you deserve to be doing what you want to be doing regardless if anyone else cares. That's what we lost in 2,200 characters. The freedom to stop caring about our impact on others, and start focusing on impacting ourselves.

This is my ten year challenge. To remember not just how far I’ve come, or what came before, but to never let go of that drive to do more with the time I still have left on this planet. To push myself beyond the limits of what I’m used to and overcome the shortcomings that still exist in the world around me. Whether that means putting down the apps and hopping on this site, or shutting everything off and reflecting on what I really want out of life. At the end of the day, no one can decide that for you, and no matter who you are and how you process your thoughts, make sure you’re not holding yourself back from saying the things you really have to say, and thinking the thoughts you need to think.

If you need an example of what it looks like when you take the gloves off and really go all out, I’ll be here, pounding away at the keyboard, as long as I have the fingers to fill these webpages, and just maybe this post will be here in ten years to show me again that letting go of what you’re used to and challenging yourself can get you to exactly where you want to be.

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