First memories of my online presence go back to age 9, crafting amateur sci-fi tales and deliberately misleading Zelda walkthrough guides on a Usenet forum. Using an IBM 5150 with a 3600 baud modem, I embraced the anonymity of a chosen handle (Aslan—in case you needed further dweeb credentials) despite knowing most forum members in real life. Thus began a decades-long cycle: joining the internet with creative intentions, losing myself in an online persona, reckless posting, followed by implosion, quitting, and swearing off the internet with a hangover-like resolve.
Until I entered recovery a decade ago, these episodes were doused in the accelerant of substance use, mental health challenges, massive grief—all masquerading as an attempt to explore deeper societal conflict. Our deepest wounds crave community, but hyper-individualism defines that as audience — I suspect all online spectacle, and human conflict overall, stem from similar attachment traumas and unresolved issues..
Nowadays, I’m a community-based social worker that still understands the value of creative expression — especially when immersed in community. However, I’ve seen my personal practice not reflect my values as I battle the 40 hour work week and slide, understandably, into the solipsistic attention traps of social media that satisfy and exhaust our precious dopamine centers. While I don’t believe these systems conspired to nullify our motivational energies to express and create community — I am fairly certain it was a happy accident that coincides with profit incentives.
Nonetheless, I find myself with renewed desire to express myself more fully than an Instagram intra-comment war with an account name using a mix of slurs and random integers, the calling card of a chat bot, so here I am on substack with yet another attempt to blog somewhat regularly. My initial intentions was to make this writing informed by exploring mental health strategies alongside some expressive content — but I’ve decided its is wiser, and healthier, to keep that kosher with anything work based entering this space only as a demand of necessity to whatever I’m writing about.
Hope to return to this soon, and may we all be free from suffering.
You forgot the long hours in the game room at the UCLA student union. Driving 22-year-old grads mad by freezing their characters in Mortal Kombat and forcing them to do breakdancing moves before administering the fatal blow. You’re lucky they didn’t waylay you in the elevator