social media is the language of the lonely

to find what we’ve been looking for we have to be willing to let it go

“I’m surprised by something that came up,” she whispered.

“I’m really lonely.”

My chest tightened with gratitude for her openness, but her revelation didn’t surprise me at all.

I had just finished leading a workshop where I’d asked everyone to close their eyes, and while the circle sat in stillness, I prompted:

“Envision a room filled with the community you desire to create. When you open the door and step in, what do you feel? What’s the energy in the room? What sensations does it spark? What dynamics are present in the relationships you see there?”

An exercise to illuminate what’s possible, an invitation to recognize why it hasn’t felt possible, yet.

My community was born from loneliness, too.

My drive to create a global network — and the methods that allowed me to form deep connections with thousands of people around the world — found me in a season of isolation.

I started expanding my online community into the tens of thousands when I couldn’t fill five fingers counting friends to call over for dinner, in my “real world.”

I grew up in a city that isn’t small but feels like a town that is, enveloped in a tight-knit group of kids I met on the playground at 5 who became adults I partied ‘til sunrise with at 25. I had the privilege of knowing friendship that some spend a lifetime looking for, but “belonging” was never part of that deal, for me. The place I was supposed to call home never fully felt like it, so 6 months before turning 30, I booked a flight to find another one.

Peak pandemic, I moved to an actual small town — in a new country, with a different language — and the loaded loneliness that can only be felt in a room full of people you love was traded for the quieter kind that’s felt in the absence of them.

The closest friends I’d ever made had been thanks to parent-mandated playdates, but now my best option for connection was through my tiny glass screen.

And so it began.

Grainy inspirational quotes, double-taps to show my “like,” personal confessions in the DMs like an early aughts chat room.

Whatever effort had been poured into my previous social life was poured into my present social media, and five years and 34K followers later, I’ve almost forgotten what loneliness feels like.

The grainy inspirational graphics turned into thousands of clients, the DMs into girls trips, the voice memos into week-long retreats, the memes into inside jokes from in-person memories. The business I built through my determination to belong has become the catalyst for connections far deeper than I ever could’ve mood-boarded about.

My story is not unique.

There is a direct correlation between IRL isolation and URL leadership.

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Hundreds of thousands of influencers found their first fifteen minutes during the 2020 lockdowns. Famously, Tinx has shared that the reason why she decided to pursue TikTok — which has led to a career somewhere close to celebrity — is because she was alone in her apartment with nothing better to do.

Social media is the language of the lonely.

My job is to help creatives grow their communities, and the majority are driven to do so because they weren’t able to find one that fit quite right, for themselves.

Building from that place serves our platforms well.

The less fulfilled we feel in our reach-out-and-touch-it lives, the more prolifically we can participate in our digital ones.

I still notice that when my husband is out of town, my capacity to create increases dramatically — and when I’m travelling with a group of friends, the opposite. Sometimes I catch myself jealous of the people who live alone, in the early stages of striving to be seen, space for endless creation.

It’s a beautiful idea, to be in control of our own belonging, but it’s also complicated.

Amidst the expansion of our online worlds comes a reckoning with our internal ones. Years spent staring into the eyes of our loneliness, our mission as the mirror.

The practice of community building begins with examining our own experiences with it — and for so many of us, we’ll find lack. Our desire to create it shines a light on the fact that we’ve never had it, in the first place. It brings up questions of enoughness, wondering why we didn’t fit, was it our fault, will we ever find it, do we even want it?

The first hurdle we face in cultivating our own collectives is adopting the belief that we are worthy of acceptance within them, too.

The second is deciding whether we’re willing to give up the quick hit of connection from the comfort of our couch for the very thing we’ve been seeking, since we started.

In the beginning, our loneliness is a gift.

Our fuel to find connection, a critical piece to our process.

But to find what we’ve been looking for, we have to be willing to let it go.

𐄂𐄂

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ICYMI:

leading with jealousy

no take-back-sies

digital puttering: reclaiming the online playground

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