(Curtain opens; a white guy is standing at center stage, because, you know, where else would he be?)

a classmate in the creative nonfiction seminar this spring used the phrase ‘unabashed neuroses’ to describe my writing, and I still don’t know if it was supposed to be a shot. It’s probably fair though. so I guess I’m back on my bullshit~

i made one of those black box posts on instagram a couple days ago, and man was it an ordeal. I thought about it literally for hours before I finally did it, and I regret doing it roughly as much as I probably would if I hadn’t done it.

my thought process (heavily abridged):

• this is a meaningless gesture, it accomplishes nothing. it’s the very definition of virtue signaling.
• virtue signaling gets a bad rap. everyone virtue signals all the time, we just signal different virtues.
• still, this feels like close to a textbook example of the ‘bad’ virtue signaling that conservatives make their bad-faith claims about. it’s a fucking social media post and nothing more. it’s solely performance.
• but I don’t know, maybe it’s not. If nothing else, it does, at the very least, signal sympathy and empathy. It’s another voice.
• but that’s all it is: a signal. It achieves nothing material beyond identifying myself as someone who thought it would be cool to make the same social media post that everyone else was making.
• but it’s not like I’m on some big show-off shit. I have, maybe, ten real followers, and i rarely post. whatever I’m doing, it’s hard to imagine that I’m doing it for the clout.
• but if I have that few followers, what’s the point? What’s accomplished besides signaling to them?
• i can include the hashtag, so my voice is part of the larger chorus. Then it’s like, who would even notice me? I’d be one voices among a sea of them.
• but then, again, what am I doing? I’m just jumping on the Bandwagon of Whatever’s Most Convenient, and I’m making sure to mark The Least I Can Do so that there’s easily identifiable proof that I did it.
• also, I have no history of posting about this kind of thing, so it feels even less genuine. I made a post in my story taking a really brave stand in opposition to racism against Asians, but that’s it. All of my public posts are mostly pictures of animals with song lyrics or snippets of poetry that are varying degrees of ironic/cryptic. I’m literally just one day deciding to go in on this subject.
• but so what? It’s important, and if my motivation is sincere then who cares?
• well, because the post makes it about me in a real way. shouldn’t I just shut up and try to offer more material support?
• but I don’t have hardly any material support to offer. I’ve had to discontinue, for the moment, the support I offer to animal rights and welfare groups, and if I don’t have resources for that then I definitely don’t have resources for other struggles that, while I certainly believe in their importance, are simply not as important to me as animal rights.
• regardless, it makes me uncomfortable to think I’m participating in something that, regardless of its intentions, is probably going to mainly end up serving to soothe the egos of people like me rather than helping the people who need help.
• so what then— do nothing? regardless of my intentions, am I just engaging in nihilistic thinking that invalidates all pragmatic action and just ends with me convincing myself to do nothing.
• it’s also true that there’s no way to avoid being performative, especially on social media. everything we do is, at least partly, intended to act out a persona that we want to convince others— and ourselves —is the person we are.
• this leads to the uncomfortable fact that, at least in part, I don’t want to make the post because everyone else is doing it. I generally don’t make a big show of it (LOL!), but I don’t, as a general rule, take part in trends, fads, etc.; it’s just not the kind of thing I do (i.e., my regular ‘show’ is to not do these kinds of things).
• but this is a terrible reason to not show up, even in this tiny way, for such an important moment. It might be even more self-absorbed than the people making multiple cringeworthy posts going on and on about their frustration with other white people who just don’t get it, smugly luxuriating their own righteousness. Am I not just performing a different brand of smug righteousness?
• and so on and so forth from there.
• there’s a whole extended section about how my social phobia plays into all this, but it’s not worth recreating here.

i ended up making the post, but I didn’t include any text/hashtags. so I could feel good that I didn’t try to put on any ostentatious performance. but also so my less than a dozen followers were the only ones who saw it and it had no impact beyond, basically, taking a stand that told people who I already know agree with me that I agree with them. I think the post got five likes.

i don’t feel great about it. 😕

(Curtain closes)