I’ve been thinking (lamenting) about how much of my life revolves around digital realms.
You may know I moved to Denver in June 2019, a hop, skip, and jump away from the pandemic. I traveled a lot in the nine months after I moved here—a trip to New Orleans with my college friends, a work trip to LA, a trip back home to NY, a press trip to northern California, 3 weeks in Israel to visit my sister and her family, and then a trip to Miami the week the world started shutting down.
I thought that I had time to settle into life in Denver, and I also was glad to be visiting familiar faces during a time when not much was familiar at home.
Of course, I didn’t realize that those 9 months that I spent traveling instead of rooting into community here were my only chance to do so before the world shut down. And then we were home. Home for so very long. You know how it goes.
Instantly the world became reliant on being virtual—virtual workshops, zooms with friends, texts to let the neighbor know you dropped off an avocado at their door.
For someone who already existed a lot in the digital space—working remotely as a freelance writer, building many connections and friendships from social media—this wasn’t as foreign to me as was to others. Maybe that’s why it took a while for me to catch on that this was, in fact, different.
Now it’s nearly four years later and my community exists solely online or through long-distance friendships. I have very little community here in Denver, though I am trying to work on it.
It’s weird, though, to be existing in this liminal space. So much is accomplished virtually and digitally, yet I also feel so untethered.
Recently I was listening to
's podcast and reading her list of 100 ways to market yourself off of social media. Last week had their readers of share ways they could do the same. And as I read all these beautiful ideas, I froze: it felt so scary. To walk up to a stranger, to hand out postcards, to resituate myself in the present moment and space. It is something that has become unfamiliar.When I owned my first business, an ethical fashion store, I'd lug around suitcases and hangers and rolling racks from pop-up to pop-up. I'd wear the clothes I sold, I'd talk to people when they said they liked what I was wearing, explaining the mission. I’d pack orders. And while most of my business was e-commerce, the clothes themselves as well as the pop-ups tied me to time and space.
But the world has changed and my life has changed and now you get this little newsletter every week in your little inbox and we don’t exchange avocados and we don’t get to have silly little conversations over coffee and I don’t mail you clothes. I suppose that’s how it’s been for a long time—I’ve had a newsletter or blog of some sort for the better part of a decade, and on and off for longer—but it feels compounded in my reality by the fact that I’m not sharing avocados and secrets with friends IRL, either.
No wonder it’s so easy for me to question my work in this world, when everything is as easy as highlight, delete, rewrite and poof, your website has new offerings, your newsletter has a new description, your IG bio shifts the way people see you. You can reinvent yourself in a few strokes of the keyboard. Online everything is editable.
Yesterday I spent 5 hours reading about and watching videos on how to grow your Substack newsletter (and subsequently completely forgot to write and send it). And it circles back to so many things I discuss with the entrepreneurs I work with: defining your audience (who you are writing for), your value to them, etc. And in this continued existential crisis I am in, it made me oscillate between “I need to double down and get clearer on the subject of this newsletter” and “my mind is a multiverse and my subscribers are the friends I like to talk to about all the things going on up there.” As previously discussed, I hate niching down, and while growing this newsletter is currently a hyperfixation, I miss the serendipity of rambling about these topics at a dinner party to someone I just met. I miss the allowance of fullness of self, which is how friendships work. We don’t typically like a friend just because of their expertise or knowledge or rants about a singular topic, we love them for the complexity of who they are.
Our attention is so limited these days (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem) and so we need to hook people into our online world with the perfect one-line description. It feels daunting and heavy and not something I think we’d ever expect in person. Can you imagine meeting someone at a party, asking for their one-liner, and promptly walking away if you weren’t impressed?
Where I am landing, and what I am realizing is that I need to be more grounded in reality. Because existing mostly in the digital space requires so much effort to be succinct, to be acceptable to strangers on the internet, to contextualize who you are and where you’ve been, and where you’re going in a little snippet to hopefully entice strangers to want to hear from you. And it’s scary because, as my therapist says, I am out of practice. What once came rather naturally to me feels so foreign. I’d imagine I’m not the only one feeling this way after the last few years.
Funny realization while simultaneously trying to grow this newsletter. Because I do have things to say and I want people to know them, damnit (so please share this? love you).
That’s where I’m at today.
“Can you imagine meeting someone at a party, asking for their one-liner, and promptly walking away if you weren’t impressed?” I’m going to be thinking a lot about this... quick discernment re: which voices you consume in an online context is a big part of media literacy these days but I’m sad thinking about how that same judgment would play out IRL.
Very thought-provoking, Sarah. And what a nice writing style!