Messing Around in the Lost & Found

On shedding skin and social media presence

Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921 | Tate Britain.

I think I am a little bit estranged from myself. In a good way. After I had COVID for the millionth time last November, I wrote a short essay about the sense of freedom illness affords when you feel constantly constrained by work and social media and, well, the horrible alackaday tragedies of late capitalism.

Placed firmly outside the rhythms of daily life, you become estranged from it. That estrangement is the place where everything happens. Social media shrinks back to its real-life, pea-sized dimensions. Work is folded away like clean linen, a life-necessity, but one that must be safely stowed away for take-off. Everyday routine must be placed into a pocket or held securely in your hands. Friends check in and check out and you are left gloriously on your own. That kind of noisy silence allows the mind to revisit the places it truly remembers, the ones that inhabit a blackout zone where only true memories live on, untouched by the gnawings of longing and the acidity of anxiety. I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, I’m glowing, I’m flying. Look at me now.

I am obsessed with narratives. The ones that are marketed as such, quite prestigiously packed into books published by reputable houses, but also the more primal kind of storytelling that constitutes the fabric of life itself. Whoever tells the more compelling story gets elected; all top barristers are the best storytellers, and we only get a sense of selfhood out of telling ourselves stories about our own lives. If you do feel the need to go through a philosophical route, Deleuze and Braidotti will question the very notion of identity, but I think that beyond the idea of self as becoming or nomadic experience, our bodies are quite aware of just how random our material experience of the real world truly is. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are also tools of entrapment: I can’t, I don’t know how to, I wouldn’t, I absolutely will not.

I have been reading a lot of Beckett lately – and yes, I can confirm there is something quite boundless in Fin de Partie that somehow does not quite translate into Endgame – and a lot of Sontag: essays, diaries, interviews. Because in the grand scheme of my own life storytelling late June felt like a bit of… well, a Fin de Partie, with so many doors closing and others opening up, I felt not like sulking on my battered little heart, but rather being quiet, standing very still as an observer to gauge what did I actually feel like besides sad. And then because I was bedbound for a few days (hoorah for medical violence! someone literally poked my uterus into a bleeding mess that had me on antibiotics and painkillers for over a week!), I had a lot of time to myself, even though I was asleep for most of it. There were strange, hazy dreams, but there was also a kind of courageous, firm, certainty that I am someone other than the person I have been projecting onto as a kind of identity. And because I suddenly realised I could do without many of the layers I was compelled to shed, my powerlessness felt extremely powerful. The hurtful stuff matters not here, for I feel that it is not about them, but really about the change the hurt produces and the boundlessness of not being uncaring towards them, but of realising I am actually quite fine being someone else.

Looking for another chance,
Looking for someone else to be
Looking for another chance
To ride into the sun

Whenever I travel, I try on different personalities or versions of myself for size. I go into coffee shops and give a random name when asked by the barista. I’ve been Emily, Veronica, Anna, Caroline, Jane, and there’s always a thrill in not only giving them a random name, but also having that name called and responding to it. This one time at Starbucks I told them my name was Mary and then the latte cup said Merry, which I thought was rather brilliant. I still have that sticker in a paperback somewhere.

When Romance came out last summer, somebody questioned Grian Chatten about the changes in the band’s sound in comparison to Skinty Fia, and he said that there was something such as feeling that too much praise, or rather too much agreement, around an album made the band feel like they needed a change to shake off the flies, so to speak. I am paraphrasing, of course, but this image of shaking off flies, or rather doing what works for you instead of what others approve of, stayed with me. This kind of radical change does feel like a death of sorts. To be good at being human, I feel like one must die a thousand deaths, like David Bowie sacrificing Ziggy Stardust at the height of the Spiders from Mars’s popularity.

And there is a time for curtain if you want to live life itself as an art form. I think about Ellen Terry and her genius, and of how being the biggest actress of the nineteenth century paled to her in comparison to being happy. To be a successful human being. And this too fascinates me more than anything else: to live well, to live meaningfully, to experience the world, and others, and to feel the grass under my bare feet. To love and be loved, to be viscerally appreciated, to touch someone because they feel me through whatever I manage to scratch into the Earth’s surface, be it a reading while walking essay, be it a kiss.

A little over two weeks ago, I decided to deactivate my Instagram account not only because I felt a little burnt out as we were set to announce the closing of Senhora Bennet, but also because it all felt very muted, very banal, and performative. I started doing stuff on Instagram in 2019 when I was 25 and extremely excited about the platform. But it changed so much that I haven’t missed it at all. Everybody seems to love my Instagram account but me: maybe I don’t want to be there. Maybe I will want to return at some point and feel seen, but are the people there even seeing anybody at all? It seems like an unforgivable waste of energy to be dedicating time and care to something so expendable as social media in 2025. It was supposed to be a week-long break; then I was ill and forgot completely about it; and now that I am back on my feet, sort of, I don’t feel like reactivating at all. This might just be curtain for me.

I mentioned Sontag a few paragraphs ago. The first essay in Styles of Radical Will is “The Aesthetics of Silence”. She writes of a craving for silence in art and in life, and the kind of philosophical ramifications of a self-extinguishing instinct in the artist. This is such a weird, media-frenzied time we live in, that I often find myself wondering if there is any way of a kind of counterculture finding expression online; I wonder if there is any way of communicating on social media that doesn’t feel cheap or transactional (and Sontag feels there will always be a transaction, even a minimal one, in art) or gross. I still have the impulse to communicate, to think, to write, to observe, but I want to do it in an aesthetically satisfying way. I want to be quiet, I want to reinstate some kind of notion of privacy and of sacredness. I have felt invaded by social media so many times, so why wouldn’t I just shed that skin?

So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric”. Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

- Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”

I am grateful to everybody who ever took the time to care about what I had to say online, and this is very unlikely to be a definitive goodbye. This newsletter will go on in its own rhythm, after all. But social media… if and when I do come back, it will be rather different: "I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring."