Homework Lighting System Girlfriend Foudre Wi
Yvette Burkhammer
Is this thing on? Should I dust off this keyboard? Are any of you....still here? Still listening? Still occasionally poking your head in the doorway to see if anything has changed? Or is it just as I feared? An empty room where my lone voice is now echoing? Or perhaps I wanted an empty room all along? A place where I could feel less pressure and fewer eyeballs on me? Whew, there I go again. Asking a million questions before I even start.
Before we continue, I know what you're thinking. "Another content creator complaining about social media?" Trust me, I'm rolling my eyes at myself right now, too. I've written about my problematic relationship with social media many times so I'll spare you the tiny violin solo, but for anyone who also struggles with social anxiety to the extent I do, perhaps today's post might hit home for you. Or at least make you feel a tiny bit less alone in the never ending scrolling of 7 second videos that convince us we need to be everything and everyone, all the time.
It hit me hardest when we were in Italy this past summer. Somehow, surrounded by olive groves in the morning, Renaissance masterpieces in the afternoon and all the pasta and gelato I could muster each night, I couldn't shake a sense of mourning. A mourning for a parallel version of my life that looked and felt and smelled and tasted like mine, but one that wasn't beholden to social media in the same way. One that didn't look at a beautiful village corner and immediately think of a video idea. One that didn't automatically pull out a phone or a camera to capture the moment before the moment even happened. One that didn't obsess over how to overshare a vacation while simultaneously making it look effortless and inspiring. And one that definitely didn't spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about an opaque algorithm's effect on my self-worth as a creative.
In a very "Everything Everywhere All At Once" multiverse kind of way, I kept seeing glimpses of this other Krystal actually experiencing her vacation first hand, while my Krystal was only experiencing it second hand, afraid to let moments go without capturing them somehow to share on the internet later.
This feeling wasn't new for me. This feeling has been growing for quite some time now. I suppose that trip was the first time I saw that other Krystal very clearly and instead of indifference or curiosity, I was envious of her.
Now, I realize in the scheme of things, how obnoxious this all sounds. There are bigger problems in the world. Much bigger. And my inability to separate work and personal life is low on the totem pole of things that truly matter. So I tried to do what any sane, rational person might do when they need perspective. I decided I needed to lighten my load. Take a break in the ways that I could.
Perhaps that seems counterintuitive, especially when you consider how active I've been elsewhere on the internet. But as someone who loves to spend time on her writing in an age where we give less and less of our time to reading in general, it felt like the biggest weight to offload in a sense. I focused my energy on the platforms that pay my bills and I tried to disconnect beyond that. I set out to free up as much headspace as I could to try to figure out what I actually wanted to fill my headspace with. (Spoiler: the jury is still out on that one but it fluctuates wildly between moving upstate to renovate an old barn and moving to Tuscany and opening a flower/book and antique shop.)
The point is perhaps best summed up in this Austin Kleon quote I stumbled across some months ago: "Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I'm bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it's so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you're out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, 'Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.'"
For over the past decade, I've been very good at filling all my waking hours with productivity. Hustle culture: the calling card of any millennial, right? And with the advent of social media necessitating so much of our attention spans to remain relevant and highly ranked in an algorithm, I needed to release some of the mounting pressure I was putting on myself to keep everything running all the time. And this space, as much as I loved it, was a strain I just couldn't juggle anymore.
The only tricky thing about seeking boredom as a recovering workaholic? It doesn't come naturally. And it takes a great deal of unlearning. Many months in and I'm still unlearning. But the point isn't to demand progress. It's to encourage small habits.
Case in point: A few weeks ago, Ty and I stayed at our friends' Courtney and Eric's house in upstate New York, while they were out of the country. It was the first time since our trip to Italy where we had been in a house with lots of open space to just relax, read, make meals in a kitchen larger than ours (for the record, that's not hard to beat) and play with our puppy Etta in the backyard. A previous version of Krystal may have jumped at the chance to create a ton of content in her new environment and I'd be lying if I didn't give in to her once or twice. But for the most part? We leaned into our boredom. We watched the snow fall. We talked about life plans. We slept in. We made coffee and instead of sipping it while looking at phones, I watched out the windows for groups of deer and the occasional bunny to pass by. And generally, lost track of time. As you can imagine, it was wonderfully not productive and I felt amazing afterward.
My first grade teacher, Mrs. Webb, and the ice cream trips she took us on for reading a certain number of books each month. Ted, our middle school bus driver, and the high fives he gave us when we got on the bus. My old soccer coach, whose daughter died at 16 in a car crash.
Don't get me wrong, by no means am I in a hurry to get to these future chapters of my life, but I do think it's high time we start romanticizing the art of aging and seeing it for the gift that it truly is. After all, dreams are wonderful, necessary even, in our youth. But please, whatever you do, don't let them stop there.
I don't say any of this without blame myself. I know I'm caught up in it, as well. Which is why I'm making an effort to practice more patience these days. Taking long walks without my phone. Learning and enjoying how to be a beginner again. Snapping more moments on film. Daily routines that help remind me, just because things can be instantaneous, doesn't mean they always should be.
All that said, I suppose I should also add, breaking the cycle of impatience doesn't come easy for me. Quite the opposite, really. I spend a disproportionate amount of time every day berating myself for not doing all the things that I think are expected of me. That I expect of myself. Even this blog hiatus of mine gives me anxiety. But I suppose, at some point last year, after my sweet dog Elvis passed and I tried picking up the pieces of a hustle mentality to stay relevant on the platforms that pay the bills, I knew something had to give.
Secondly, I suppose I might be coming out of my blogging hibernation. Or rather, I'd really like to wake up from this slumber but I'm now debating if I'm ready. Either way, I know I've missed you all terribly and appreciate the kind comments and messages you've sent in my absence. If I haven't underscored it lately, I'm so very blown away by this community of strong, intelligent, curious women who decide to visit me here.
Not that anyone has truly asked me to explain myself or my blogging absence lately (although I appreciate those of you who have checked in with me in recent weeks), I do feel a certain responsibility, perhaps to myself, to understand why I needed this break. Or better yet, why I still need this break.
If you happened to read this blog post from a few weeks ago, you know we recently lost my sweet dog, Elvis, to lymphoma after a year or so of chemotherapy treatments. Personally, I'm still reeling from this loss, as anyone who has lost a beloved pet will understand. It's a pain that, no matter how much I tried to mentally prepare for, I still felt blindsided by and quite honestly, may feel for quite some time.
What punched me in the stomach even further after losing Elvis was the cold realization of how much of our attention, time and energy is necessitated on social media, specifically Instagram. Speaking as someone who makes her living solely online, largely on the aforementioned app, I quickly realized that my week-long social media break to grieve the loss of my dog resulted in severe account reach limitations, making it next to impossible to reach even a small portion of my audience, let alone prove to my current and potential brand partners that our collaboration was a worthwhile investment.
In short, my mental health break was damaging to my "social" presence and earning capability, because Instagram rewards the accounts who are the most active, the most consistently engaged and the most willing to forgo personal boundaries 24/7, and punishes those that are not. If you're willing to burn out on this app and dedicate all your time to it, you might get ahead. If you value some sort of offline life, you'll have an increasingly harder time marketing anything very successfully online, unless you can afford a team of people to run it in your absence, which yours truly, like many other small businesses, cannot.
In the weeks that followed, I found myself spiraling in a lot of self-doubt, a lot of negative self-talk, a lot of imposter syndrome. Suddenly, I felt all my time being sucked back into this app that I fully knew didn't have mine or yours or anyones's best interests at heart, and yet, I was beholden to it. My livelihood depended on how well I could "suck it up" so speak to try to "stay relevant" in the ways I could stay relevant online (whatever that means). And when you have thousands of dollars to pay off in chemotherapy bills, work isn't exactly optional.
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