Confession: I’m having a social media….I was going to say “crisis” but I think a better word would be “collywobble.” This term comes from the 19th century and it’s a mashup of “colic” and “wobble” and means either queasiness or anxiety, or some combination of the two. My social media collywobble looks like this: There are times when I am thoroughly entertained by it—for example, early this morning, watching a short clip that features a woman wearing a VR headset walking straight into her microwave, which lent itself to an eruption of bedside giggles—and times when I am so saddened by the ruinous disinformation and hatred being volcanoed out that I feel like the world is ending. As a result of this wild swing of emotions—the collywobble of which I speak—I’m often so discombobulated by the alternating bouts of hilarity and horror, I’m stymied by what my own offering might be.
Perhaps the trouble for me stems from the feeling that social media is like a live-wire pointer finger waving in our faces, plying us with content that depends on excess and extremism, preying on the frailties of our faculties, acting as a kind of ringmaster of a traveling show where there is only one ring, not three, and the ringmaster presiding over it keeps trading one megaphone for another, or there are so many ringmasters and megaphones that they have become the show itself, which is to say the show has gone missing, and there are only just ringmasters and megaphones left.
An aside: I was actually in a circus for exactly one afternoon, taking center ring at the Cow Palace in South San Francisco in 1995 with the head clown at Ringling Bros. to participate in an intermission act involving (unsuccessfully) juggling highly breakable plates.
There’s no evidence of this, of course, because social media didn’t exist in 1995. But I’m telling you, it’s true.
But back to the collywobble. Perhaps it has something to do with the technical parameters of social media—the limitations of image boxes and word counts. This plus geotags and hashtags and phototags, and it starts to look less like the thing you want to say and more like a squished-into-a-sequined-bodice version that can’t quite breathe. Or, to use the parlance of branding: “Same great taste but none of the calories.” Except it’s more like “What is this thing I’m putting in my mouth?” and “Why on earth am I chewing it?”
The truth is, we spend way more of our living real estate traveling than arriving. We are more process than product, more experiment than final analysis, more interior pages than book cover. What is that expression? “We live in the dash” - you know, that dash on a tombstone bridging the birth and death dates. Social media so often feels like it’s skipping the dash, more intent on sticking the landing than addressing the complicated, nuanced walk between the first rung of the ladder and the outside edge of the diving board.
I’m returning, now, to a memory of an eighth grade music recital, in which I was participating in a trio composed of flute, piano, and oboe. The very short version of the story is that I had been practicing my part (the oboe) for months but right before I was to start playing at the recital, I somehow managed to crack the reed (probably bit down on it, warming up) and no sound came out. Not matter what I did, the oboe yielded only silence. And because I had failed to bring a backup reed, my only choice was to walk off stage. The trio turned suddenly into a duo, and it wasn’t that much later that I quit the oboe entirely.
What happened on stage was a momentary blip, a kind of burnt end off a piece of bacon. But off of it was where the real meat of that whole experience was. The mulchy complexity of what I had experienced in front of the audience—bewilderment, then mortification, then anger, then sadness—transmogrified into a whole new set of unexpected emotions—triumph, empowerment, glee, freedom—that came alive the moment I disappeared behind the curtain.
I don’t know exactly, how things changed so drastically the moment I left the spotlight, but I’m realizing, as I write this, that the collywobbles have something to do with the dash and the slow walk to the diving board and the unplayed oboe carried by a 14-year-old girl into the wings of a stage, and all the in-between spaces where the meat of who we are actually lives. And somehow creating an abbreviated, reductive version of those spaces—and here I mean the squished-into-a-sequined-bodice confinement that social media can feel like—obscures the beautifully complicated and content-rich topography of the rest of the story. Which is to say the story that isn’t merely the sum of its parts, but the story that IS the parts.
It occurs to me that a big part of the responsibility of being a human being has to do with taking the risks of discernment. Of identifying what matters to us, specifically and personally, and letting that be the compass of where we put our attention and effort and care and love. So it’s far less a matter of keeping up with the Joneses than making an offering on behalf of that attention and effort and care and love. Of expressing and inhabiting those things as fully as we can, and in a way that feels meaningful. I’ve been experimenting lately with making (and sharing) video poems like the one below. I get to do what I love the most—to play and tinker and learn and learn some more—and also to pull back the curtain to share the work that so often happens away from view. To slip a different reed into the old oboe, and to hear what it really wants to say.
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One of the hard things to learn is what to ignore. Sip for taste then decide if the drink is worth it to you.
I blayed clarinet and bassoon in HS and can relate to your dilemma.