Maybe One More Platform Will Fix Me

I’m sick of my lack of permanence.

Since my adolescence I’ve had a pretty overwhelming amount of public self documentation. A youtube channel, multiple blogs, zines I sold, instagram (multiple accounts), tiktok, websites, et cetera. Most of those ventures, though, you couldn’t find if you tried because I scrubbed them from the internet before you could say “digital footprint” (I mean, the best one can. Nothing really leaves here).

I think it’s the regular old growing up dilemma. If a post gets posted on a blog and you’re not there to cringe and delete 2 years later, did it really resonate? I used to think the solution to the cycle I found myself in was to stop sharing, that my thoughts don’t need to be public. To an extent, I still believe that. I was an open wound when I was a teenager, so caught in the sticky fly trap of being closeted and growing up in fundamentalism and also just the horrifying self importance of a 18 year old that just decided to move to a big city to go to art school. I published poems and essays and way too personal instagram stories like it was my job. I wanted my pain acknowledged, my mettle lauded. I’m glad I’m not there anymore.

That’s the thing, I’m not there anymore.

Like it or not (and I like it), I am an adult. And something that’s not changed in growing up is I love to share. I love the dizzying accessibility of thought that stems from being the first generation raised on the internet. I love that one day, I will look through my hard drive of everything I’ve posted (I download it because I don’t trust platforms to stay forever, as evidenced by what’s going on with tiktok in the states right now) and I can see who I was. I’m sad my old writing is gone (most of it, that is). But that just means I’ll have to write some more.

This really came to a head when I archived my instagram posts up until right before I came out as transgender. That I don’t regret so much, as even though I’m whatever the opposite of stealth is I don’t love pre-transition photos of me being readily available. If you want to see me as a girl put your back into it and do some sleuthing, I promise it’s floating around somewhere on Zuckerberg’s meta. But in my gut I know it was an excuse. In 2 years, when I want to delete my tiktok because I was too fat, and my instagram posts that don’t cut it anymore because 35mm is out and digital is in and 0.5 is cringe now, and lord knows this blog would be the first to go, what will I cook up to justify me cutting ties with myself?

I used to think being private was the antidote to being caught up in persona. You can’t critique what you can’t see. But for me, that’s fighting nature. I love millennials with moustache finger tattoos the way I love communication theorist’s Marshall McLuhan’s quote “The medium is the message”. I want to exist in time and space. I am part of the first generation of trans people where medical transition is readily available (in this country). What a privilege. What a nightmare. I want to go out of style. I want to look back on my humour and my metaphor and have my skin crawl. I am sick of pretending to be timeless. I am so deeply of my generation, for better or for worse. What’s truly honest, for me at least, is a breadcrumb trail of photos and text leading one to who I am at any given moment.

I don’t know what this thing will be yet. But I do know I’m not going to delete it.