What happens to interior freedom when you become conscious of being watched?
You know what sucks?
The whole books/Instagram thing.
I hate even saying it like that because it sounds so fucking small. Instagram. Bookstagram. A social media account. Who cares? There are bigger things happening in the world. Real problems. Real life.
And yet I am genuinely sad that a place I loved feels contaminated.
It was a place where I went to be myself. Honest as fuck. Reading experiences. Vulnerable posts. Raw thoughts. Real engagement. Real friendships. Intelligent conversations around books.
I brought my books, my brain, my humour, my weird little observations. I brought the things I was thinking about while reading and put them somewhere other people could encounter them. Sometimes someone would recognize themselves in what I had written. Sometimes they would disagree. Sometimes they would say, YES, THAT.
There was a healthy ecosystem there.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically in the vague social media sense of “community ecosystem.” I mean ecosystem in the environmental sense, which is probably inevitable given that my degree is actually in Environmental Toxicology and I’ve worked for an agency that protects ecological integrity for over twenty years.
Agency. Integrity. Remember those words as you read this.
So, yes. I know something about contaminated ecosystems.
I know that contaminants can change the conditions of a place without becoming the whole place. I know that exposure matters. Concentration matters. Persistence matters. Pathways matter. I know that some contaminants break down and some persist. I know that remediation can be possible, but that it is rarely as simple as making something disappear.
And I know that sometimes the most appropriate intervention is not pretending the contamination isn’t there.
It is reducing exposure.
That is what changed for me.
The books are still there. My writing is still there. The people who genuinely connected with what I was doing are still there. (I love you guys so much.)
But my relationship to the environment changed. Because I am not there.
There is something uniquely unsettling about knowing that someone is watching you when you did not invite them into your space. Something changes when someone’s surveillance becomes part of the conditions under which you participate.
You notice who is looking.
You notice yourself being observed.
You have to block fake accounts.
You can’t let blog metrics and certain daily repeat state viewers affect your every move.
Because suddenly the space that once allowed you to be expansive makes you smaller. You start thinking twice before posting something or sharing a story. I won’t say how many times I thought about publishing this… but goddammit… agency.
You edit yourself before anyone else has even asked you to. You decide not to share, to post, because of someone else.
That is the part I hate most.
Not the drama. Not even the behaviour itself. Because that reveals character. Really immature, unintelligent, toxic character.
It’s the cause and effect.
The fact that I started feeling like I can’t move through that space freely.
Reduce myself.
Go private.
Step away.
It feels like I’m being cornered and that choice is taken away. Like there are now terms and conditions built into it. All because someone is monitoring me. And I feel I can’t stick up for myself.
Well, maybe this is what they intended. To be that anthropogenic threat to the ecosystem.
Well, fuck that. Nobody puts baby in a corner, amiright? I don’t want to spend my time thinking about spies and stalkers. And why they are doing it in the first place. I don’t want someone else’s attention to become a condition of my participation.
And it pisses me off that I have allowed other people’s behaviour to make me question whether I am allowed to breathe in a space I helped build.
That playground-mean-girl bullshit cuts off the oxygen.
And yes, the ecosystem is much bigger than the pollutant, the contamination.
There are good people there. Genuine friendships. Interesting conversations. Plenty of oxygen for everyone. There are still books. There is still that part of me that wants to show up and say, I read this, and this is what it did to me.
That hasn’t disappeared. But neither has the reaction. I’m writing a blog post about it FFS.
On resilience and exposure
I think what I’m struggling with is the dynamic between resilience and exposure.
I keep treating my ability to tolerate situations like this as evidence that I am resilient. As though the goal were to absorb it, recover, and carry on as normal.
But resilience isn’t an unlimited capacity to absorb pollutants without consequence. Exposure changes the system. Enough of it, over enough time, can change what the system is capable of tolerating. There are some things I am still capable of. And some things not.
So yes, this affects me. I don’t need to pretend otherwise. I’m a sensitive person. I also don’t need to prove that I can tolerate it. Because it destabilizes my own nervous system too.
Ugh. I don’t know what to do.
But what about reclaiming the space? Posting anyway. Showing I am not affected? Well, that would be pretending. I’m just too honest for that.
And really, that’s not reclamation. That’s just the exposure with better branding.
Ya, I’m rambling. Almost done.
On mitigation measures
Jesus Christ.
Who would have thought I needed mitigative measures to survive Bookstagram?
Oh, Robyn. Naïve woman.
Reduce exposure. Control the severity of adverse impacts. Protect what matters. Give the system time to recover.
I could add IDGAF and be done with it, but that’s not me either. I give all the fucks. I like that about myself. It is care. It is empathy. It is who I care about and why.
I can’t simply restore some imaginary pristine version of the ecosystem. I can’t pretend it hasn’t affected me. But I just don’t want one contaminant determining the conditions of the entire system, friendships included. This blog included.
Because there are still things there (and here) I value: the books, the writing, the conversations, the people who know how to show up, and the part of me that still gets excited enough about a sentence to need somewhere to put it. Above all, there are real people with real feelings involved.
Those parts are worth protecting.
And maybe that’s why the books I’ve been reading have been getting tangled up with this too. Ya… making a sad attempt to weave in the books here.
I’ve read a lot about who gets to look; who gets to tell the story; who gets access to another person’s interiority; who is claiming territory over someone; who is controlling the pen. The Vegetarian, The Piano Teacher, Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Notes on a Scandal, The Book of Evidence. They have all, in different ways, made me think about the power of observation and what happens when you become aware of the person doing the looking.
So I don’t want to live inside someone else’s gaze.
I don’t want to make choices according to who is watching. And the reasons why they are. And I don’t want someone else’s access to me to become the condition under which I think, write, or exist.
So maybe that’s the thing I’m actually reclaiming. Trying to anyway.
Not the account. Not the ecosystem.
My agency.
I get a say in who gets access to me. I get a say in what I do with the exposure. I get to decide what I can absorb without losing myself. And I get to decide what I do when the conditions change. That’s good environmental management, isn’t it?
Idk. This all just feels shitty. Crazy how people want to and can make others feel this way in what should only be a beautiful, supportive environment.
Anyway, I’m going to spend some time breathing the oxygen freely in my own life. Not in someone else’s territory they’ve marked as their own. Where they have staked their claim. And have implemented monitoring controls. That ain’t for me, or my heart.
I have kids. A job. A plane ticket. Books. Friends. An enormous heart filled with people I love. And a world that is considerably larger than one particular bizarre little ecosystem.
And its pollutants.
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