I feel like i am in a zoo.
I am terrified to be here and I have done a poor job of communicating how frightened I am. I am fucking terrified of the world en masse and even more frightened of the way people tire of it so fast. I am in the middle of my own narratives realizing there is no sense to be made of this life excepting whatever I am able to stitch together. I shroud myself in my quilt of loose cares and attempt to speak to you all. Right? Because that’s what this is all for. To speak to each other and learn care for one another, even if we may never be neighbors or get ice cream shakes or pass by each other at the library. I feel like i am on display lately. I attempt to speak and people marvel. They laugh and gasp and applaud. “Look! A life! Feelings! Learning!” And then I am consumed. And walked by. I keep ending up so visible and so lonely.
At the risk of sounding untethered and ungrateful: I want to vomit. I never set out for this. I have avoided social media my whole life because I was afraid of being boiled down and taken like a shot— acceptable and pretty and briefly inspiring and so far from the humanity I manage to only enjoy by myself, in the night, sucking a cigar and nursing THC-spiked tea. Lonely to my bones and probably better, I supposed, than speaking to be disregarded. Or worse— to speak and be marveled at instead of spoken to. Instead of responded to.
I came to TikTok because i was being consumed everywhere else. Everywhere else. I had trained myself to like it, as it was my only option at the time. and I was drinking + smoking myself to a slow, lovely decay. I started off on the app pretty and light and I was busy dying slowly in private and i didn’t want to overdose one day on accident without ever at least… trying to be happy. So i tried! and i was a hit! And it was weird and largely by accident! I felt like I was flying, being so sweet and so easy and managing to make others feel so cozy. I assumed all this would pass. I waited to come back down.
And then there were all these eyes. All these eyes at once, and growing. I didn’t know what one hundred thousand subscribers in five or so weeks would do to me and this life I took joy in hiding. Numbers like that quickly begin to be unimaginable. And I had never really… been on social media before. There’s no manual for this. What happens now?
Nothing happens, I thought. This won’t really affect my life in any real way, right? Why would it? How could it? I got a call from a friend sometime in March of 2022. Maybe six weeks after my first video. He said, “You’re on TikTok??”
“How did you know that? Did you see me?”
“No, I don’t have a TikTok. I saw you in a YouTube compilation.”
“Oh.”
I think that’s when I took my mind and put it in a jar.
I will tell you another secret: I had every right to be scared.
Nothing about this keeps me safe. The longer I am up here, visible, editing quicker, training myself to be more and more captivating, becoming wittier, better read, better at this— the longer i spend suspended in this limelight I was certain would pass without fanfare— the better I get, the longer I am here, the less inclined you will be to say hello to me. The longer I am up here, the less people speak to me like I can see them. I am not doing any of this to put on a show or garner attention. I am here because the thing that grounded me most when I was crash-landing in to sobriety was picking up my phone and saying AREN’T YOU FRIGHTENED OF THE WAY WE ALL TIRE OF THE WORLD SO FAST??? and having people speak back to me instead of around me, or above me, or without me. Even when we were not in agreement! People said hello to me. And now I speak and am told I am inspiring. I am told I am so beautiful and so intelligent. I do not care about these things and I don’t really think you should either. It’s not that I am not glad to inspire people, it’s that inspiration is really tangential to the point. I am speaking to you. Please say hello to me.
I didn’t understand the heights and depths of my actions last year when I was busy trying not to die, finding something that made me happy, speaking to you all. I can never go backwards. I am watching the worlds we each hold in our hands die uprooted, die flooded, catch fire. I’ve asked you to help me save my world in small ways, in ways I can touch. I ask you how your world is. I ask you what you can see. People used to speak to me and now I am inspiring and unreachable. No one says hello to me. I understand that’s the fine print of this contract I signed with the stage— that I am consumable and thus, polished and made a bit artificial and presented to you so that I may be swallowed down without ease or interruption. Fine. We’re here now and can never go backwards. I can admit to myself that I did myself a disservice when I trained myself to like being consumed— that was a lie easier to maintain when I was drunk or high or otherwise hazy. Now I sober enough again to dream when i go to sleep at night and I am mourning this fractured ability to be here with you all feeling. To be raw in complexity. To be unfolding in real time. Do I even know how to do that anymore? I do not want to be fucking inspiring no one says hello to me
I am grieving a life i can never return to and i cannot focus my brain enough to cry about it, so here’s what we’ll do. We’re here now. I’ll tell you want i want.
I want you to remember that you are in my living room. I know I have catapulted here, made big enough such that other people orbit about me and check for me and care for me, and that the condition of being a Western creator (especially one who is in the United States) is that I am placed automatically on the world’s stage. I know that i did choose this, at least to some degree. I know that you all do not feel like a nameless, faceless mass of people to me anymore. You feel like people that see me in a parking lot or a coffee shop or a farmer’s market and say hello. Here is what I want: to read and think and laugh and sit with you all, like people do. It was very foolish to begin a life on the internet where i try endlessly to love strangers deeply but i am a fool and i am doing the best i can. I am here heartbroken because it often feels like folks find me too consumable to want me back. Mutual wanting is something that real people do and I am in a zoo.
Despite all this. Please. I want to read with you. Do not wooooooo at me. I am not marvel, I am a person and I am still dying slowly. I am a person that thinks endlessly about death and tries not to smoke as much anymore. The reason I am reading in public is not because I want you to find me inspirational or heroic or even good. It is because it took me three weeks to muster up the clarity and wherewithall to read the introduction of a book that i once read cover to cover in two days. Weeks to write about a book that I had read before. I am telling you all that my brain is fried and laid to rest after having Covid, after being sucked out sweetly by personal grief and by the general public, after trying to make sense of the incalculable number of screens my face and voice have flashed across. My dyslexia is worse because i don’t read and write like i used to. Please, please read with me. Read my essays and tell me what does and does not make sense. Read the books with me so that we can rebuild our minds and stave off the constant dying. My brain atrophies. I hold up a text on screen and people applaud. Don’t woo. I had dial-up internet until I was thirteen and now my face has been on tens of millions of screens. My mind is dripping out of my motherfucking ears. Please say hello to me.
In conclusion.
After a lifetime of hiding in plain sight i am here and have accepted that i am supposed to be. I have accepted also that i am not longer quite human anymore… ad that grief was good to feel. All the cool kids are afro-pessimists anyways. Posthumanism has been waiting for me to lay this midnight drinking to rest. Something is here after this conception of humanity— i am realizing i am maybe insane and also maybe longing to be human was me begging God to settle. Maybe there’s more than human.
The new conditions of my life on your screens are as follows:
I blinked sometime last year and found myself in public, on this expansive stage. Except. Except. I am not really on a stage. This is my living room. I am a worm in my fertile earth trying to save my life in little jars. I reach towards what keeps me thinking. Mutual aid helps me respirate. Political thought that props up community keeps my body breathing. I committed to being here in real time to tell you about what i am learning. I am a little worm who lives and reads. We must read these things together if we’re to catch this world that falls on us like a star. A world without capitalism is not idealistic; it is not just insane; it is inevitable; it is, in fact, already on the way moving towards us like a baby being born so please do not leave me here in this plexiglass cage. Do not leave me here in this people do and settle for being entertained by me. I am not trying to be entertaining. Do not use my videos to cosplay learning. This is not a stage! This is my living room! And I am having tea. You and i are speaking intimately about the things we read and need to survive all this. You tell me lovingly that maybe we are banana nuts crazy. I pour honey in your own mug and remind you that death is sweet and love is grief. No wonder we feel like we’re all dying. No wonder we all feel insane. We clink a glass and turn the page and do what we can together to prepare for the coming spring.
I do not care if i am human or not. You are in my living room. Please say hello to me.
ismatu gwendolyn
PS. Thank you for allowing me to grieve this life I can never go back to in public. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.
please say hello to me.