Some of the recent favorites we’ve reviewed in the BuzzFeed Books newsletter.
Mollie Shafer-Schweig / BuzzFeed
Riverhead Books
Heike Steinweg
Saturday, October 31, 2015
My Obsession With Other-Dimensional Witch Travel
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed
Late one night in 1960, my mother (she would have been 15 then) woke in her single bed with the blanket kicked off, sweating in spite of it being deep wintertime in small-town Maine. She was far from her family home in Gibara, Cuba, at a Catholic convent boarding school populated entirely by girls from different Latin countries, girls who were learning English and still absorbing their new alien status. She was also far from her closest childhood friend, Mireya, and a disturbing dream about her had startled my mother awake. They were standing across from each other in the nighttime dark, somewhere outdoors, and my mother stepped closer to Mireya, to talk to her. Suddenly, a young man appeared, came between them — and buried a knife in Mireya’s chest. My mother felt as if the blade had split open her own skin.
Months later, after several letters to her friend had gone unanswered, she learned what had happened: Mireya had been killed by a boyfriend. The murder had taken place around the time of the dream.
As told to me by my mother when I was 9 or 10, this story became one of the minor legends of my childhood. Several times, I asked her to repeat it; it seemed to grow in power with each retelling and become more mythic. My mother intentionally raised me to be distinct from the good Catholic she’d been — she wanted me to see myself as a liberal, a feminist — and I grew into the kind of sophisticated skeptic that composes an entire demographic in my hometown of New York City. But I could never shake a natural attraction to the mystical, the inexplicable, the capital-m Mysteries. The root of it, I think, was all my time in church: the ritual, the repeated lighting of candles, the censers of incense, the elaborate robes, the stories of the martyrs etched into glass panels, the high mass of the sacrament. But it was that image, too — of a girl’s impossible trip through space to witness a killing — that suggested the universe might have a far more crooked logic than any we’ve been able to map. Looking back now, this was one of the reasons, ultimately, that I decided to study witchcraft.
Over the past decade, as a writer and a documentary filmmaker, I’ve indulged my fascination with the edges of belief, spending part of that time immersed in witchcraft and the occult through communities around the country. Along the way, I met Morpheus, a witch who was then living on a wild, hundred-acre parcel of land off the grid in Santa Clara County, California, where she and her partner, through Herculean effort, had erected their very own stone henge for group rituals. Through time spent with Morpheus and her inner circle, I came to understand what it means to be “Pagan,” a label used by most people who practice contemporary witchcraft — possibly as many as 1 million Americans today. I came to know Morpheus as a diehard, dedicated priestess, but also a woman with a wicked sense of humor, a too-loud laugh, an excellent preference for the word “badass,” and complete ease with any of my own doubts and questions. She made me want to know more about the Craft.
And so, more than 20 years after my mother first told me of that nighttime episode, I found myself surrounded by people who believe they can explain it.
It comes down to something called “astral travel,” one of the most far-out practices I’ve encountered in present-day American witchcraft. It’s a way of leaving your body and wandering through another, parallel level of reality known as “the astral,” or the astral plane. Many witches believe that we all travel this way while we sleep — but, once awake, our memory of the experience is so cluttered with dream imagery that we often can’t see the truth of it. With skill, focus, and intention, they say, your actions in this "otherworld" can take deliberate shape, answer specific questions, help change your personal destiny. On this plane, you can battle malevolent spirits, build sprawling temples using only your mind, merge with a stranger through staggering, transformative sex, walk side by side with celestial beings.
The concept of astral travel has been around for centuries, across several cultures, from ancient Hermeticism to Taoism and Hindu mysticism. And in medieval times, there were the benandanti, or “good walkers” — farmer-visionaries in northern Italy, in the 16th and 17th centuries, who believed they had the ability to travel outside of their bodies at night to fight off evil. Two of the major occult societies to rise up in Western Europe during the 18th century, the Golden Dawn (whose members included Yeats) and Ordo Templi Orientis (made famous by the incredibly controversial Aleister Crowley), claimed that some of their core magical work took place “on the astral.” And now this practice has its place in the modern American Pagan movement. Add to that the sprawling, affluent New Age set, and the number of Americans today who believe in astral travel may be in the several hundreds of thousands.
One American witchcraft tradition that requires astral work before initiation is Feri, a secretive, influential group whose following on the West Coast has been escalating over the past decade. Feri was founded in southern Oregon in the ’50s by the poet Victor Anderson, the son of a ranch worker, who combined indigenous American and African diaspora practices with the magic he learned from a local coven of Dust Bowl refugees. Victor was blinded in an accident when he was 2 years old — and yet he said he’d developed etheric sight, enabling him to experience the astral plane. He claimed he’d been trained in astral travel at a young age by a collection of witches, and he and his priestess-wife, Cora, believed they first met and became lovers in this otherworld. This explained why they got married only three days after saying hello.
According to members of the second, younger generation of Feri witches whom I’ve gotten to know, this is some of what’s possible on the other plane:
While wandering on the astral, a witch may come across a place to worship her gods — maybe an Old Irish roundhouse, or a Roman temple with Corinthian columns. And, on a given night, she might instruct her covenmates to leave their bodies and travel to meet her there for ritual.
A witch who wants to join in a ceremony thousands of miles away from where she lives in the Bay Area — say, at the home of other initiates, in the Northeast — might travel outside her body to get there, following a signpost the group has laid out for her in the ritual circle. And afterward, she can return to her physical body where it’s been lying all along, on the floor of her bedroom, on the opposite coast.
A witch may be enlisted by his otherworld “guardians” to spend his nights on the astral, doing battle against wicked spirits for hours on end. And this might go on for weeks, until he is so exhausted from lack of sleep that he strikes a deal, promising to keep up the fight as long as his guardians give him time each night for rest.
A priestess, while traveling on the astral, may find herself rerouted, as if her GPS coordinates had been recalculated by a force larger than her. And this place might be a strange, cavernous building hung with hundreds of swords, and there might be a river of blood flowing through it. And there her goddess might appear, blood-covered, and give her instructions to follow once back in her mundane life.
Or a witch might have an other-dimensional sexual encounter. Victor (who died in 2001) wrote about one such episode that took place when the Grand Master of Feri was already 59 years old. He awoke just before 4 in the morning, aware that he had left his body, and began traveling up through a series of ceilings and floors to a higher room, where he met a group of people — mostly young women and androgynous men. And they asked him to remove his shoes (but not his socks); and eventually, he was left alone with a woman he calls “Karen,” who told him “Now, move with me as if we were dancing.” And soon they were dancing; and he could sense that, in this other reality, they were both equally male and female at the same time. And suddenly, he wrote, “we were swept together, like two magnetic fields, our astral bodies blending together” — because on the astral, as Karen put it, “flesh doesn’t stand in the way.” His description of the climax is ecstatic, seven sentences long.
These are just a few of the otherworldly experiences claimed by American witches in college-town Massachusetts, in the woods of Oregon, and in so many corners of the Bay Area. These are the parallel-universe adventures of the sons of ranchers, government employees, massage therapists, publicists, and schoolteachers. When you learn of a belief like this, belief in a human ability so exotic and enormous, you must decide how to react: You can reject the notion outright; you can subscribe to it wholesale as the superpower you’ve always longed for, now available through careful training; or you can do as I did and take a kind of middle road. I chose to roll with the possibility that there might be things in the universe I just didn’t know about yet.
But if this is pure fantasy (go ahead and call bullshit if you need to; it’s understandable), what desire does this astral-plane business tap into? To me, it seems clear: It’s a desire to take action, to be effective — if not in this world, then on another, parallel plane. To have a purpose; to be useful. As if so many thousands of witches are asking, Could there be another world in which my actions matter more? Could there be a way to live a life larger than the one inhabited by my heavy, physical self? For many Pagans, their mundane lives are elevated by time spent on this other plane. As Victor wrote of the aftermath of that night of astral sex, “[I] returned to my body and found that the presence of my wife with her arm about me was most exquisite. She was enhanced. My feelings toward her were greatly enhanced.”
If you believe, then you believe you have found access to a talent as close to a supernatural power as a person can imagine having, a tool through which to realize your most superhuman self. And if you do not believe, and you read these stories here, or listen as they are told to you by witches, there is this: The idea of astral travel — as a skeptic, you’d call it a “delusion” — is still linked to the better part of ourselves. Because what could ever be wrong with wanting to be useful, to be strong, even if you have to invent an entire separate plane of reality on which to make that possible?
It is hard to be around practices like this one and not grow curious. And as my curiosity deepened, my relationship with a particular priestess — with Morpheus — gave me the guts to push further. And soon I found myself studying, practicing, a part of me wondering if I might someday access that place my mother traveled to on that late night at a Catholic boarding school.
I know I am not alone in this curiosity, even outside of the Pagan community. There are many more who, unexpectedly, will recognize some piece of their secret experiences or family legends in stories of this kind of “travel.” Over years of trying, as a writer, to explain my more esoteric interests to friends or half-strangers, in a bar or in some work meeting in New York or L.A., I’ve been met with confessions — from people who count themselves as grounded, level-headed professionals, non-flakes, mortgage-payers, solid parents, takers of no bullshit, the whole gamut. Again and again, I’ve fielded asides, in lowered voices — descriptions of that one experience that defied logic. “I never talk about this, but once...” I simply took that haunted feeling, that personal mystery, a few steps further.
I still cannot completely accept any explanation of my mother’s encounter. But, in deciding to train in witchcraft, I eventually had my own inexplicable experience — on a long, late night in New England, in a castle, surrounded by the coven with which I’d been studying. Exhausted, dancing, chanting, I felt I left the body I was tethered to and found myself in another landscape; I felt the warm air there and smelled the sea and the cypress trees. It lasted for a few moments — and then it was gone.
***
Alex Mar is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Her work has recently appeared in The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, The Oxford American, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic, currently streaming on Amazon. Witches of America is her first book.
To learn more about Witches of America, click here.
Sarah Crichton Books
Problems Only Book Lovers Understand
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
With LeVar Burton.
When you get into a good book, the last thing you need is life's distractions. Don't worry, Reading Rainbow's LeVar Burton feels the book lover struggle too.
Many a time, you've sacrificed pages of your book to the food gods, because you just can't put it down.
BuzzFeed Video
And you have one too many bumps and bruises from running into things.
BuzzFeed Video
Let's not forget that your alone time is valuable reading time.
BuzzFeed Video
We Read An Erotic Trudeau-Inspired Story And Were Only Mildly Aroused
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
“I was like, not negatively aroused.” (NSFW!)
Serving the Prime Minister: A Canadian Romance is an erotic story that is not about Justin Trudeau while at the same time totally being about Trudeau.
Written by Sam Shiver, the short book (as in, nine pages) is available for Kindle devices from Amazon.
The book's protagonist is Shawn, a fresh-out-of-University campaign volunteer who ends up working for the new prime minister, Dustin Waterhole. One late night at the office, the two share some beers and then (spoiler!) they bang.
Amazon / Via amazon.com
Elamin: None whatsoever.
Sarah: None.
Ishmael: No doubt, but I can't understand the name's origin. I mean Justin>Dustin. Sure. But Trudeau>Waterhole? WTF?
Scaachi: Because of butts. I think.
(We have realized that "Waterhole" is English for "trou d'eau." Sound it out.)
BuzzFeed Canada
Elamin: Yep, fresh out of uni.
Lauren: And somehow assisting the prime minister? Also probably for no pay? This whole thing is an HR violation.
Scaachi: He's also very fit. He is sure to talk about his fitness.
Sarah: He ate EGGS and a PROTEIN SHAKE.
Ishmael: "I liked having a nice body and wanted to keep it," says the 23-year-old protagonist who also has a "useless" poli-sci degree.
Lauren: Also his whole "I'm not gay, I like CHICKS and PROTEIN, but also totes let's have sex, PM man."
Elamin: RIGHT. Like what. I don't even remember when we started kissing, but then boom, my first gay sex of my life.
BuzzFeed Canada
Everything You Need To Know About Toronto's Harry Potter-Themed Bar
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
Yes, they have “Butterbeer.”
Welcome to The Lockhart, a cozy bar that will conjure up all your nostalgic feelings for the wizarding world.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
Ever dream of meeting your fellows Gryffindors for a cocktail? Dream no longer. This place will put a spell on you and make any hardcore Harry Potter fan drunk in love.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
The small, exposed-brick bar serves up hand-crafted cocktails made with house-infused liquors. One of their most popular drinks is "The Shacklebolt," a spiced rum and ginger-beer-based cocktail.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
Here's How Much Fun I Had On The "Harry Potter" Studio Tour
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
I had fun.
The Great Hall
Costume Display Area
The Entrance To Dumbledore's Office
Various Paintings
44 Inspiring Songs To Listen To While You Write
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
As suggested by you.
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
"Prelude – The Atlas March" – Cloud Atlas, Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil.
"Hearts of Courage" by Two Steps From Hell
Suggested by zarayachan
We Tried Out Magic Wands And Here's What Happened
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, October 31, 2015
Swish and flick!
Lynzy Billing / Chelsey Pippin / BuzzFeed
They say the wand chooses the wizard, but we (Ailbhe and Chelsey) thought we'd have a go at picking our perfect magical match from a selection of some of the most popular magic wands on the market.
We may be Muggles, but with the wand trade expanding from niche Diagon Alley shops to the much more accessible Amazon, we wanted to try our luck to find out if we've got some magical blood after all and our Hogwarts Letters just got lost in the mail back in the day.
£34. Buy it here.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
A: This wand feels great in your hand, sturdy so you can shove it in your robes, but not too heavy. It's plastic, with a nice, bright light-up tip. It turns on and off easily – which is probably really handy when you're up all night studying.
C: It's really rather balanced, nice and weighty handle and definitely tough, but quite sensitive – it hardly needs to be waved to get the magic going. Definitely practical, and also fashionable! it's got a bit of an elven touch, with vines and leaves carved around the rod.
Friday, October 30, 2015
This Is Amber Rose's World And We're Lucky To Be Living In It
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
On October 27th in the year of our Lord 312, Constantine the Great was converted to Christianity by a heavenly vision at Battle of the Milvian Bridge. According to the legend, a fiery cross appeared in the skies above with the message “Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα” (“In this sign you shall conquer”) emblazoned across it. The vision immediately fortified him, setting him on a path to victory and to an empire the likes of which the world had never seen. On October 27th of 2015, the world bore witness to a similar event that will surely change the course of history. On that blessed day, Amber Rose released How to Be a Bad Bitch. To call this debut book of instructions on how to fucking live your life right for once anything short of a miracle would be falsehood — NAY — heresy.
Gallery Books
The model/entrepreneur/muse/activist/prolific taker of butt selfies addresses her readers as friends and familiars and makes her intentions for us clear early, “I want to help you be the baddest bitches ever.” That familiarity is why I feel like it’s fine for me to refer to her just as Amber for the remainder of this essay. Also because that’s already how I think of her when I’m imagining us as the goddamn best of friends whose selfies together are what could actually make America great again, but I digress. This transformation starts with developing a vision of yourself and your life and then very deliberately taking steps to make it a reality. In her words, “Figure out who this bitch is.” Between stories from her life and tips from her routine, HTBABB is sprinkled with direct encouragement, because Amber knows us and loves us and wants us to be happy.
This may come as a shock to some, but I came to HTBABB with my own preconceived notions about Amber. Specifically, the notion that she is an infallible goddess choosing to grace us mere mortals with her presence because she is as benevolent as she is beautiful. I count myself among the ranks of her die-hard fans, affectionately called “Rosebuds” to her self-described “Muva.” But since every rose has its thorn, there is also a veritable army of detractors and shit-talkers littering our lovefest with hateful bile against Amber on social media and beyond. Fortunately, she lays out precisely how to handle such detractors in her chapter devoted to fashion: “If someone doesn’t understand or accept who you are, fuck them.” Figuratively, of course. She gets into the people you should literally fuck in later chapters on dating and relationships because this book has everything.
"If someone doesn’t understand or accept who you are, fuck them."
Amber pulls no punches. Her advice is direct, laden with swears, and highlighted with explicit imagery like her description of how women’s eyes bug out of their heads when they blow a guy or how getting laid isn’t that hard because “a guy will stick his dick in a block of Swiss cheese.” You’ve got problems and she’s got solutions. A guy doesn’t want to use a condom? “…Tell him to go fuck himself.” Can’t afford fancy cosmetics? “Go wild at the drugstore for way less money.” Ridiculous standards in magazines got you feeling like you’ll never be beautiful or stylish? “Fuck that. No more.” You want to know where your date stands on having kids and it’s only the third date? “…As far as I’m concerned, you should feel it’s your right to bring it up on the first date.” Wondering if it’s ever OK to fuck around with a guy who’s attached? “Never. Hell, no.”
While the book is full of photos of Amber’s curves, I couldn’t help but see all the parallels. To my life, that is. Amber and I both worked as strippers and aren’t ashamed of it. We both have ex-boyfriends who used that piece of our pasts against us. My skull shape is weird and I look too much like a grown Cabbage Patch Kid to shave my head, but we both came into our own when we went platinum blonde. And though mine won’t sell nearly as many copies, I also sold a book this year in which I repackage a lot of suffering into something I hope is helpful to other women whom the world has conspired to convince are something less than they are.
It is because of that suffering that I write this essay with such hyperbolic joy. This essay is so exuberant in its praise not just to be silly but to serve as an antidote to the poison spewed in Amber’s direction over the seven years that she’s been in the spotlight and at countless other women with similar backgrounds. Disappointingly, much of this venom comes from self-described feminists. They claim she has no particular talents, ignoring her business acumen and activism and dismissing her as famous only because of dating Kanye West after only a brief foray into modeling and music videos. It’s funny, I don’t see many people screeching about how Kate Moss is famous only because of how she’s monetized her image and body. I don’t hear cries of injustice that Liv Tyler was “just a video girl” when she was starring in Aerosmith's "Crazy" in the 1990s. Kate Middleton — what the fuck did she do but date and marry someone famous?
Amber Rose is precisely the kind of woman who ought to be benefiting the most from feminism because she lives its values and proves it can work.
The real reason she is so derided is that Amber Rose is a woman of color from a poor household in a working-class neighborhood who relied on her erotic labor to survive as a young woman, the kind of profile that makes her more conveniently into a talking point than a spokesperson. When she transitioned to modeling and music videos, it was for hip-hop brands and musicians deemed illegitimate or invisible by virtue of their proximity to blackness. Then, when she was attacked in media, she harnessed control of her image and repurposed the insults into shorthands for royalty. Instead of cowering or growing mean, she became a force of positivity. She beat their fucking swords into ploughshares and she is reaping the shit out of that harvest. The truth is, Amber Rose is precisely the kind of woman who ought to be benefiting the most from feminism because she lives its values and proves it can work. But that truth must be silenced because there are too many fragile men and mainstream media assholes and white feminists with the privilege to have only had to theorize over the concept of erotic labor rather than perform it who are terrified that some stripper from South Philly might know a thing or two more about navigating and uplifting womanhood than any of them.
It is that tidal wave of shit that people keep hurling at Amber Rose that compels me to erect this bombastic little monument to her brilliance. As far as I am concerned, she hung the moon and stars. Her voice is the pitter-patter of cherubs skipping across iridescent lily pads and her body is Eden made flesh. She is as intelligent as she is seductive, a genius and goddess in one. And I fully believe that as the parade of hate inevitably marches on in her life, she will continue to inspire girls and women who are slowly being crushed by similar cruelty because she will wave off their hate and choose to embrace love. And in that sign she will conquer.
***
Alana Massey is a writer in Brooklyn, NY working at the forefront of Feelings Journalism. Her book, All the Lives I Want, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing. She tweets at @alanamassey.
18 Words In The Philippine Language You Can't Translate In English
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
You can try your best but you won’t succeed.
What it means: It's what you feel when you're not really angry at someone, but you're not really happy about them either. Usually felt towards a special someone.
Isabelle Laureta / BuzzFeed
What it means: It could roughly mean 'enough', but it doesn't quite cover the essence of the word. It could be an expression when you don't feel like explaining what you feel or mean in detail.
Isabelle Laureta / BuzzFeed
What it means: An intense tenderness, sweetness, and affection rolled into one word.
Isabelle Laureta / BuzzFeed
Isabelle Laureta / BuzzFeed
How Many Roald Dahl Children's Books Have You Read?
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
Fantastic Mr. Dahl.
23 YA Novels That Will Take You Back To The '00s
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
Prepare for a walk down memory lane.
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
Mia Thermopolis got to live the dream of becoming an actual princess. Although it wasn't exactly perfect or easy, you followed her on the journey from average high school student to regal princess — and what a ride it was.
HarperCollins
The Clique by Lisi Harrison
Popular girl Massie Block and her Pretty Committee had everything a girl in middle school could want: Juicy Couture sweatpants, Uggs, and a pool. Enter Claire Lyons, a more average girl, who's much more relatable and whom you wanted to see beat Massie at her own game.
Poppy
Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
Before it was a hit TV show, Gossip Girl was a best-selling series that was a bit different than the show. Gossip Girl followed the love triangle between Nate, Serena, and Blair (among others) and kept you up-to-date on all the drama and scandals.
Poppy
The It Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
Fans of Jenny Humphrey got to see even more of her in this spinoff of Gossip Girl. Bringing the same high-stakes drama from the Upper East Side to upstate New York, this book kept you in the know with short chats between every few chapters.
Poppy
How Good At Spelling Are You Actually?
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
It’s as simple as ABC.
28 Profoundly Beautiful Quotes About Life And Death
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
“To die will be an awfully big adventure.” —Peter Pan
—Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Submitted by Jay Eldred, Facebook
Jupiterimages / Getty Images / Michelle Regna for BuzzFeed
2. "Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?"
—Epicurus
Suggested by Matthew Hall, Facebook
3. "If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death"
—Samuel Butler
Suggested by Tawny Mangiaracina, Facebook
4. "Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace."
—Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
Suggested by Sara Ranus., Facebook
—Sirius Black, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Submitted by janaeb2
Malija / Getty Images / Michelle Regna for BuzzFeed
President Obama Says Books Have Had A Major Impact On His Life
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
“The most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels.”
In the upcoming issue of The New York Review of Books, President Obama interviews Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson about — you guessed it — books!
Pete Marovich / Getty Images
In the interview, Obama tells Robinson how novels and fiction have had a tremendous impact on his life.
Pool / Getty Images
"When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president...the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels," he said.
Pool / Getty Images
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you.
Every Day I Want To Quit Social Media
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 30, 2015
Today is the day I finally leave social media.
I feel I’ve outstayed my welcome. I don’t have anything else to say. The feeling has grown in the weeks leading up to this point; I’ve seen my social media activity plummet in popularity. When you’re online every day, valuing each post’s health as a measure of your own literary career, you begin to lose sight of yourself.
It has worn me down to the point of panic, exhaustion — it’s why I should have left by now. It’s why today is it. I’ve made it to this point; just do it. The effort put in outweighs the end result, and it’s really become a problem; if I’m feeling the way I’m feeling, there may no longer be anything meaningful. It could be that I’m only hurting myself.
I wake up staring at my phone. I fall asleep to the glow of the very same screen. I think about whether leaving social media would make any difference. It probably won’t, and yet I can’t bear to look away.
I always have at least a handful of tweets and posts ready days, sometimes weeks, ahead of when I plan to use them. It keeps me calm, assured that I will always have something meaningful to say, or at the very least, something funny, clever, clickworthy. I never want to be caught off guard. I never want to be left speechless.
Every night, at approximately 10 p.m., I end up back where I started: my desk. I frequently fall asleep there, just as often waking up in the middle of the night, mid-sentence, without any understanding of where the night went. I skim a list of to-dos, all of them dealing with projects for Civil Coping Mechanisms, Electric Literature, a script or two. Toss in a novel and at least a few submissions and you’ll get the typical roundup — a little typesetting in InDesign, a few press releases to draft, a banner to design, a writing session to fit in somewhere — this is a typical night and I am already overwhelmed. I feel that horrible wave of exhaustion from having been up since 6 a.m., and I almost leave the desk for the bed. A few sips of coffee and before long the caffeine kicks in and I can keep going.
I double-click on InDesign and watch the spinning wheel and static Adobe startup screen as it slowly loads. My attention wavers, the cursor moving toward a familiar tab with a blue bird on it. Only while the program loads, I tell myself, and I begin scrolling through the feed, feeling the urge to catch up. When I get the prompt asking me if the current fonts are installed, I’m suddenly too busy to bother, and click cancel. I turn my attention to Facebook, seeking a more immediate response. There’s work, but I trick myself into thinking it can wait.
I skim the newsfeeds, liking and commenting as I see fit. Maybe a few shares — nothing wrong with one or two before noon. It’s early but never too early to share some content.
I watch as someone I know posts something not only clever but also completely on-point. I feel naked, concerned — anxious. It bothers me. I like it and comment, which is the right thing to do; all the while, I envy it because I don’t have anything better to say. I don’t have anything at all.
I really just want to have something meaningful to say.
I notice that the person I’m chatting with posts about what we’re talking about, quoting and tagging me. What do you do in this instance? I like, make a noncommittal remark, and sit there watching as others do the same. I watch as the post gets upwards of 50 likes in 15 minutes. I’m envious and I don’t know why. I want that kind of response. Or a better response.
I really just want to have something meaningful to say. It takes me more time than I’d ever be willing to admit to write a post. And still, I hesitate, second-guessing every word choice. Meanwhile, my friend has turned his post into a 60-likes-or-more conversation piece, the “conversation piece” part not the result of the number of likes, but of the 80-plus comment thread that continues to grow.
Co-workers walk by my cubicle, asking if I’d like to go to lunch. I do my best to politely decline while, in the back of my mind, I’m attempting some kind of grand, not-at-all-vain-or-self-obsessed social media epitaph. I’ve seen it happen before: people bowing out of their social media presences with grace. Some don’t even care and just go silent. How? But I sit here watching the online world move forward without me, feeling ridiculous for thinking that my participation (or not) could somehow move mountains.
I am forever judging myself by my social media performance.
My mixture of self-loathing and shame consumes my lunch hour. I'm neither interested in nor deserving of any food; my attention is purely on writing a farewell that will make sense to friends and followers. I begin researching how to back up my accounts. I don’t know why really, but I search on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, I won’t be able to stay away.
I don’t find the information I’m looking for. Desperately, I click back to the tab with the newsfeed. I notice that I don’t have as many notifications at this hour as I should have, and I begin to tense up, my heart beating faster. I am forever judging myself by my social media performance.
I return to an idea that has been in my mind for weeks, if not months: relevancy. Who has it? Does anyone actually ever have it? If you have it, how long can you maintain it? I’m not quite sure if I’ve ever had any sort of relevancy, but at this precise moment, it doesn’t feel like that matters. Like I matter.
This need to matter, to count, to be relevant is what drives me to do all I’ve been doing to gain notice in the first place. And we all want to be recognized as clever or witty. It’s what leads me to posting this next thing impulsively — to earn just a handful of likes. My post is ignored on Twitter. I shouldn’t have posted at all. This is it, I tell myself, my last post.
We all want to be recognized as clever or witty.
This isn’t the first time a tweet has failed, impressions near nil. In fact, I’ve had so many duds that I almost always have a mini panic attack whenever they don’t measure up. The standard for a successful piece of content is a sliding scale. It used to be two dozen likes, a handful of favorites, maybe a retweet. Once you start getting that, you strive to improve the analytics. Soon nothing is good enough.
My post is still fresh, but it doesn’t have a lot of immediate likes; the tweet doesn’t get any attention. I delete both post and tweet. I make sure to copy/paste what it was into a Word document for investigation.
I revise the post. I tweet out the same. I’m frantically clicking between tabs, looking for some kind of change, some burst of data. I find it on Twitter, 150 or so views, no engagements. Without investigating the tweet itself, I delete it and turn my attention to Facebook. I feel pressure on my forehead increasing, radiating heat moving from the very peak of my forehead to the top of my head. I start to feel dizzy. Another migraine, I figure. But I’m too busy deleting the Facebook post to bother doing anything about it. I’m too busy funneling my time, energy, and waking life into the version of me that has begun to live online.
As I start to breathe heavily, there’s the thought that maybe I can be replaced. By whom? Someone clever, capable of becoming a better literary citizen, a better editor of a press, a better dispenser of motivational tweets. At what cost? Maybe time, maybe energy. All I know is that I can’t bear to be in this cubicle anymore. I wait until no one is around to sneak into a nearby empty bathroom. I take the far stall, closest to the wall, and I sit down on the toilet, making sure to tuck my knees into my chest, legs invisible under the partition, creating the illusion that no one is in this particular stall.
I smell that same mixture of bleach and excrement that exists in most, if not all, public restrooms. I can’t breathe. I can’t get past the fact that I couldn’t crack the current post; I think about relevancy. I think about what I actually have to say, in a meaningful sense — and I come up empty. I stare at the stall walls, listening to someone walking in, using the urinal, and leaving without any notice of me. And why am I hiding? The smell begins to make me gag. It’s not until I’m dry-heaving into the toilet, knees on the cool tile of the restroom, that I realize I’m having a panic attack.
The panic attack makes me afraid to touch my laptop. I fear that either I’ve posted something self-destructive or I’ve completely lost relevancy. Maybe both. Add a third: My internet presence doesn’t exist, every post, tweet, and picture undone — made into the sort of material conjured from nightmares. And then something rational, for perspective: Why does this matter so much to me?
Back in the cubicle, I’ve managed to compose myself. Still, there’s the lingering question: What am I trying to say? That browser tab is still there. I haven’t closed it like all the others. I feel like a failure. I should be done with social media. In the back of my head, I hear the same thing — hey, just do it, it’s not like anyone will care. And I believe it. I still believe it. Seriously, why would it matter?
It’s over, I tell myself — admit that I’m like so many others who burned out, losing sight of whatever it was that got them here in the first place. I almost feel relieved; I can exhale. I can go now.
I linger for another half hour. Mostly, I spend my time on YouTube watching video game walkthroughs, the only thing that seems to keep me calm. At some point I notice the Facebook tab flashing, meaning that someone has messaged me. I look and it’s a dear friend of mine whom I’ve never met face-to-face, and yet we're closer than I am with some of my offline friends.
Whenever one of us needed someone to talk to, we were there for each other. I was there. He was there. He messaged me, asking for advice. Turns out, he was going through a crisis, one involving the possible choice to end his writing career. I almost don’t look, fearing that these messages will keep me online. And they do — he’s the reason I’m still here. I stick around because of the community, the support that really does exist behind the overflow of information.
So what if I’m not relevant; so what if my social media presence fades over time? If it’s costing me so much anxiety and exhaustion, there must be a reason beyond relevancy.
I needed that message. I needed him to message me more than he needed me to message him back.
I ended up on social media for a reason, and though the reason escapes me during moments of sheer panic and anxiety, I take part, no matter what — the pursuit of relevancy, or, in the strictest sense of the term, validation, is an imperative that exists as a key part of humankind’s quest for meaning. Self-definition has become intertwined with social media. We are all here for each other.
I wake up staring at my phone. I fall asleep to the glow of the very same screen.
***
Michael Seidlinger is the author of several books, including The Strangest, a modern retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. He is publisher-in-chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms, an indie press specializing in innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as well as the book reviews editor at Electric Literature.
To learn more about The Strangest, out now from O/R Books, click here.
O/R Books
Thursday, October 29, 2015
The Dedication In Gloria Steinem's New Book Is Incredibly Moving
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 29, 2015
“I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.”
Gloria Steinem is now the author of another book, My Life on the Road, chronicling her stories as a world traveler and what she learned about social change along the way.
Robin Marchant / Getty Images
She recalled something he said to her when agreeing to give the abortion, "You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life."
Robin Marchant / Getty Images
And now, 58 years later, she replied, "Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I've done the best I could with my life. This book is for you."
Astrid Stawiarz
24 Hilarious Tweets Every Grammar Nerd Will Appreciate
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 29, 2015
“I used to love correcting people’s grammar until I realized what I loved more was having friends.”
22 Brilliant New Books You Should Read This Autumn
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 29, 2015
Required reading in October and November. UK release dates.
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Bloomsbury
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5 Great Books To Read In November