🌸 I have started to go back on my main socials after about 9 months. Mostly I stick around for a few minutes, unfollow accounts I don’t feel aligned with anymore, then leave. Exposure therapy!!
🌸 It’s going to take a while before I feel I’ve reshaped my previous web presence into the person/energy I embody today. Letting it be known that I do not believe in voluntary suffering, I don’t believe in having to get stuff done NOW. If it takes me five million years to do it without hurting myself, it takes me five million years, and I’m ok with that.
🌸 I’m aware it may be confusing the way I have things set up now. The closest thing I have to an answer is my most recent Internet Series essay PARTITION.
🌸 Art is the fruit of life. Art is the juicy produce that reflects the tastes and flavors of the person it grows from. So while my art is not me, it definitely reflects me. I am at a crossroads, a transformation, a renewal, and so everything I have been creating and sharing embodies that.
🌸 I currently don’t have the social and material support to make a lot of things come to fruition right now, and I’m sure what I’ve been transmitting reflects that too. The world is in a tumultuous time. While I feel fine in my little bubble, it is not infinite. The seed is running out of nutrients, the sprout must come out. I must go out into the world to find what I need, despite it all.
🌸 Everyone says you need to connect with the people around you NOW. Maybe that suits some people but it doesn’t suit me. Connecting with others for the sake of having a connection with others, despite how you feel about the actual person…that’s really not it. Or rather, I have a lifetime’s worth of experience in ill-fitting connections. I’m not going to go back to that just because things are bad. Things have always been bad.
🌸 So yes. I very much need support. But it has to be the support that’s for me, not what people think I should be, their fantasy of me.
🌸 And here is where I am stuck. How am I supposed to do that?
🌸 Or rather, the question is, how am I supposed to show my real self without receiving violence?
🌸 How do you receive money without doxxing yourself? How do you set up a PO box? How do you find a solid, steady client who will provide without losing their fucking mind at the worst possible time?
🌸 These things are not out of my reach. But I can’t figure them out without more resources, more support, more time.
🌸 The solution I’ve been thinking about is splitting my Instagram presence in two — one for dorybot to stay dorybot, a voice that speaks to an international internet audience. The other takes on the hyperlocal artist persona, effectively making my physical day-to-day life and the context in which I live a separate thing from what I do here.
🌸 Because I mean yeah it was kinda awkward, in the pre-pandemic era, not being able to readily share my socials. Artists kinda get it, everyone else…don’t. The most common thing was that I’d get to know people, feel comfortable enough to share my handle, and they’d be like….wtf?? Wtf is this????
🌸 None of the conservative cultures I live in and around would ever say or do anything about it to my face …but if you know, you know. You know?
🌸 And I WOULD like to be that bitch who just can readily give out their business card like nothing… but that bitch just can’t be dorybot.
🌸 To even type any of this out loud, publicly, feels like a security risk, a massive vulnerability. But if I can’t even speak on the things I want and need on the website I pay internet rent for. Well then I would truly have no place in this world, huh?
🌸 Anyway, that’s where I’m at. dorybot.online is stuck because I am stuck. With enough time I can hack away at anything. But no man is an island. I need tangible support.
🌸 In order to get that support, I have to assess where I’m at and what I’ve got and clear away what isn’t meant for me.
🌸 It’s hard. It’s easier to burn things down and run away. But the same things will always, always pop up until you just fucking deal with them.
🌸 In order to be free, I’ve got to be me!