If you know me - and most of you do - you probably heard that I recently took a solo train ride across the country. My “train girlie journey” as I’ve come to call it consisted of trips from Los Angeles to Chicago, then Chicago to La Crosse, then La Crosse to Portland and then Portland to Los Angeles again. All told, I spent a combined six days in an Amtrak roomette sleeping car, leaving my phone on airplane mode (ironic while on a train, no?) excepting a brief text to my partner at the fresh air stops so he knew I was safe and on track.
This isn’t about my train girlie journey. Or, not exactly (in a way, everything is in some way tied to that journey now).
I am currently on another train, this one traversing through the German countryside as we make our way back to Copenhagen to catch our flight back to Los Angeles. We spent the last week in Germany celebrating the wedding of dear friends in a remote mill in rural eastern Germany / practically Poland. Once again, my phone stayed on airplane mode. Since I had just enjoyed a smart phone free existence on my train girlie journey, I was looking forward to more time without push notifications and emoji reactions and finding the perfect captions for the perfect photos.
I’m trying to ease back into a technologically connected existence after so many blissful weeks away. I am taking advantage of the free train wifi to actually, finally, read some of the Substacks that I’ve subscribed to recently. It’s been remarkably healing and inspiring.
I’ve written about Instagram before. Too much, if I’m honest. Maybe - hopefully - this will be the last time.
But I’ve come to learn that speaking in absolutes does me no good whatsoever, it only brings me shame when I inevitably retreat on my assurance that I was giving something up indefinitely. It’s never been indefinite. To wit: I re-downloaded the app on my phone at the Berlin train station after having it deleted for three weeks.
Three weeks. It felt like three years, for better or for worse. Already I feel the shame - I couldn’t even make it back to the States before rejoining this app that has held my attention for the last decade? - but oddly enough, the idea of deleting the platform once again gives me the same shame, though a different color - I can’t even commit to caving and rejoining the app??
I should probably be kinder to myself.
I don’t yet know what my relationship with Instagram - or any other social media, for that matter - will look like. But I don’t think I need to.
What I do know is that I have found the work of so many writers here far more inspiring than anything that Meta and all its underlings have pushed into my eyeballs.
Instagram shows me things that make me feel self-conscious and left out. Substack shares thoughts and questions by other thinkers and writers and artists and dreamers that make me feel seen and like my ideas are worthwhile. It’s remarkable how much better I feel when I engage with art and writing that I opt into instead of what an algorithm pushes at me (along with paid advertisements and suggested posts for which I never asked). Or maybe that’s not remarkable at all.
Here are a few of the writers I’ve been enjoying and who have inspired me lately (for the record I did try to do the fancy embedding here but it’s just not happening today and we’re not going for perfect here):
Sav Thorpe / Train Girlie Caucus Periodically (the train girlie overlap is a happy coincidence and I must acknowledge that her Substack existed first)
I acknowledge that this is much more stream-of-consciousness in style than my other essays here, but I think some practice in that vein will also be healing for me. The truth is, I want to write. I’ve written about how much I want to write. I’ve made grand proclamations of my intent to write on some sort of schedule to no avail.
This is not another one of those proclamations, but it is a new beginning. Thanks for reading, I love you.