Learning how to inhabit (#2) the self - Pillar 1: Writing
How journaling/writing is re-wilding my attention and enriching my inner world
This is a continued conversation from an earlier post, ‘Living in a dying world’ - On learning how to inhabit. I examined how our systems teach us ‘ex-habitation’ as Yuvan calls it, as opposed to inhabitation. Also, being products of the postmodern age, earlier structures, values and systems of meaning no longer hold great meaning to a lot of us, and yet, we’ve not been able to forge strong enough new structures to which we can feel a strong sense of belonging to. To re-word it, we don’t yet have rich worlds we can inhabit together. And I’m in the process of figuring out how I can better inhabit this world, and you’re invited in the second installment of me continuing this exploration.
In my university days, we learnt a whole lot of ‘deconstructing’ various facets of our identities and world systems. But we didn’t do a whole lot of thinking about building/ thinking new systems that could take their place. Or maybe we did (I mean we did learn about Marx’s revolution), but deconstruction itself was such an all consuming experience at the time, and it is only later that I began to feel the vacuum of not having building blocks to reconstruct. And, due to several reasons, I never felt the vacuum more acutely than in the middle of second wave Covid. I picked up ‘Emergent Strategy’ by Adrienne Marie Brown and began to learn about ‘Transformative Justice’ as an alternative to punitive, carceral justice systems. This book filled me up with the joy and enriching quality of being able to dream again of new worlds. I began to search for more work that was not just saying ‘hey, current world systems suck’ but also saying ‘hey, this could be a way to rebuild better systems’.
I wrote in an earlier post that when I was reading Yuvan’s Intertidal, I felt like my mind was expanding. It brought me out of a reading slump and re-awakened my inner world in a way that I’d forgotten. I realised just how much of my own self/mind/thoughts was colonised by work, productivity, social media algorithms, etc and how little of it I could really claim as my own. It reminded me of when I was a child and used to be excited about going to bed because that was a time I would enter into my rich imaginary worlds. And so, realising what I was missing made me curious to try different ways of reclaiming my inner world, nourishing my mind and inner self. Clive Thompson calls this process ‘Rewilding our attention’ which he writes of as decoupling his brain from social-media feeds.
The thing is, I remember being superbly fascinated by the internet as a teenager. There was a treasure trove of information, music and entertainment and it really exposed me to diverse world views and allowed me to learn so much about different topics, listen to different music and explore different subcultures. That isn’t my experience of using much of the internet today though, and look, it might just be me having ‘grown up and becoming jaded’, it might be the move towards algorithm-based feeds, or a bit of both, but I can tell that using social media isn’t enriching the quality of my life, I can feel it rotting my brain in many ways, and yet, it remains addicting. Shan Boodram says ‘Nothing creates an addiction like an inconsistent reward’, and maybe that is what it is, the hope of finding a few joyful nuggets that we found solace in as children/adolescents amidst the barrage of content thrown our way. Often, I’m just using my phone out of sheer habit, just a go-to thing to do when you have a bit of time.
To be clear, I am not doing some ‘dopamine detox’ or whatever that the self-improvement gurus are advocating for these days (although I have done this, or at least attempted to do this multiple times during covid), but I think I’m just kinda feeling like ‘been there done that’ with much of mainstream social media, and maybe especially so since October 7, 2023. And I’m not really uninstalling/logging out of anything, but I just don’t feel drawn to really using it too much anymore. I am trying to pursue other sources of more sustainable, less brain-rot-filled joy, play, exploration, learning. And the more I’m doing that, got to say, the less I feel like social media has a hold on me- the healthier and more biodiverse a garden is, the less susceptible it is to being wiped out by disease- so something like that?
All this to say, I’ve been trying to trial a few new practices into my life and noticing if I am enjoying it or it’s improving the quality of my life, and I just thought I’d share those here. These have been the starting pillars of me re-wilding my attention, nourishing my mind and enriching the quality of my inner world.
Writing/ journalling: I started this Substack because I started journalling for myself the end of 2023 and realised what a ‘W’ writing was, and this Substack has also served as a ‘journal’ of sorts on things I’m learning about living in these times. I’ve tried journalling multiple times before in life and it’s never been anything that really stuck. But oh, boy, it has stuck around this time. I don’t really pressure myself to journal regularly, I don’t really have a cadence or anything- and don’t know what was different this time- but I see the immense value in writing now. It has reached a point that now I get a feeling in my gut whenever life is getting crazy and I can feel I’m getting distant from myself- a voice tells me ‘oh, need to carve out some time and journal’ and so, I know now that I will come back round to journalling when I need it the most.
Writing has helped make clear to myself what I really think and feel about a certain things and gives me distance to then decide how I will act upon what I learnt. It feels difficult to start a sewing project if all your threads are a jumbled knotted mess, but writing to me is like taking the time to unravel and unknot these threads so you can see what threads you actually have, and then it becomes much easier to decide how you might use these to sew.
It also helps create a sense of distance between your day to day happenings in life and your self-identity, which feels liberating almost. Like you could have a really horrible busy week at work, but when you journal, you get to have a rich inner world that can remain untouched by this whirlwind- and that’s quite amazing. And I think this is what they say about meditation also, right? That you can watch your thoughts pass you by or something? So has writing has become meditative for me- maybe lol.
I visited ‘Museum of Communism’ when I was in Prague in May, and there were recordings of people who fled from erstwhile Soviet Union. One man, while recounting his story, said that what made him want to escape is that he started keeping a journal. And when he started doing that, he began realising just how much of his thoughts and expression was being controlled and curtailed. It made him realise the richness of his inner self, and the urge to be able to live that out was so strong that it resulted in him wanted to leave. So, yes, journaling is powerful folks.
If you’re in the camp of ‘yeah cool but like idk what to journal, how to journal, it doesn’t really work for me’, I totally get that and like, I’ve been there, and it totally may not be for everyone cause we all do be different. But I am sharing my starting point with you if it helps in case you wanna try it out:
In my very first post in January, I wrote:
So, how do we do this? Living in these times? Got no clue folks. But I feel like me actually sitting and writing all this gibberish out instead of just moving to stimulating forms of internet actually helps…
And boy, it really did.
I was going to write down the next 2 -4 of the next few pillars/practices I’ve been getting into all in this post itself but I realised maybe it would get too long, even for ‘long form content’ for the internet, so like, more on that later.
