Drinking : Dating :: Social Media : Arts Careers
This is a real quick one because I’m headed out of town for both a friend’s birthday and my own, but the above title sprung to me while reading Kristen Radke’s brilliant graphic nonfiction, Seek You, about American loneliness, and it felt worth sharing.
I gave up drinking when I was 27 years old, and one of the things that pushed me over the edge to the realization that I had to quit, was catching myself thinking, “I wish I could just get into a relationship so I could stop drinking.”
In retrospect, there’s a whole world of missing language and identity-analysis that contributed to this correlation for my young self, not the least of which is the understanding 16+ years later that I spent my young adulthood trying to cram myself into ill-fitting Allosexual and Alloromantic boxes. But I don’t think the concept is that foreign for more normative folks either - we have a colossal cultural correlation between dating, sex, and alcohol.
In addition to having one, final, body-aching hangover in April 2009, to which I never wanted to return, a main shifting factor in my decision to quit was realizing the fallacy in believing I had to keep pumping my body full of poison in order to acquire a “success” I thought I was supposed to be reaching for, and needed in order to be happy.
The other day, while thinking about Radke’s brilliant meditation on the often misguided ways we try to “connect” with one another, I caught myself in a very similar thought: “I wish I could get a regular, consistent job, so I could completely quit social media.”
It’s not a perfect analogy by any means, but I feel there is some correlation between the ache for a thing, and the belief that a poisonous behavior is the only way to achieve that thing. As a performer, visual artist, TV show creator, public speaker, any number of the hats I wear, I’m participating in a potential fallacy that the only way to achieve “employment” is to stay in people’s minds by using a service that not only is scrubbing my content to train AI without compensating me, but moreover is actively causing my amygdala to flood my body with cortisol on a regular basis…
I have no solution currently, but at least this investigation and a good ole’ turn of the century SAT structure (RIP, old SAT analogy section) is helping me get curious about why I believe this toxic thing is unavoidable.
The one use of social media that has brought me genuine joy recently - no matter how deprivileged the Instagram algorithm seems to consider it - is collecting, synthesizing, and sharing these kid drawing prompts. So I’ll leave you with my latest, below.
(Vimal & Ellen, Jaya is next in the queue!)
