Bearing Witness
I don’t write for an audience.
Not anymore.
If I did, this blog would be considered a spectacular failure –
No likes, no follows, no engagement, no traction. No brand strategy. No marketing funnel. No optimization.
This blog exists in the void. This has always been the intent.
I keep it that way on purpose.
I gave everyone close to me the address before I said my goodbyes and slipped out of the digital prison that we all had become accustomed to living in, doing nothing but mindlessly scrolling our feeds, searching for the next laugh. The next round of theatrical hopecore. The next dopamine hit. The next sensationalized distraction.
The circus is so entertaining, the content apparently so fascinating, that it's kept my people from visiting my new digital home. Their prisons have kept them so enraptured that they've forgotten that I'm now living on the other side of the country. They've even forgotten that I left them with my new address. Their brains have been conditioned to forget everything and everyone that the algorithm has chosen to memory hole. Out of sight, out of mind. If I ever do cross their minds, they briefly wonder when I'll return.
“How many times over the years has Cassandra said she's leaving Facebook? A hundred times maybe? She'll be back. She always comes back. She's dramatic. She's The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Just let her calm down, and she will return, tail between her legs, admitting that she is just as addicted as we are. She thinks she's better than us, but she'll be back. Until then, she doesn't exist to us. The almighty algorithm has created reality, and it's left her out of the dataset. It has memory holed her too.”
This is exactly how we are kept trapped. If we ever muster up the courage to escape, we then must accept that the consequence of escape is invisibility. When you have been forgotten, when the algorithm isn't making you real, you aren't. You don't exist anymore. You are the tree that falls in the woods but doesn't make a sound. You haven't just escaped social media. You've escaped the world. The land of the living.
In an era where everyone writes to be seen, I write to remain invisible. For now.
My messages, buried layers and layers under our current digital reality, will be here forever. To be found by the seeker, and the future reader. Maybe by someone who hasn’t even been born yet. Someone sifting through the digital remnants of a past world, looking for the signals buried beneath the noise.
I don’t write to go viral. I don’t write for engagement. I don’t write to build an audience, to sell a product, to package myself as a personal brand. I don’t write for clicks or algorithms or attention. I don’t care about monetization or influence or the exhausting cycle of online validation.
I write because writing has saved my life. Time and time again.
I write because I have to.
I write because I don’t know how not to.
This is a time capsule, not a content stream.
A record of a single human's thoughts, questions, awakenings, and unravelings in a time when the world is spinning toward something we can’t yet name.
A record. A digital legacy.
Proof of life. Of existence in a world that has erased me. Made me invisible.
I’m not here to perform. I’m here to bear witness.
I am Anne Frank, writing from the attic.
Like Anne, I write because there is no other way to exist. Like Anne, I write with no guarantee that these words will ever be read, only that they needed to be written.
I am Franz, metamorphosizing into a giant cockroach, starving, suffocating, and forgotten.
I am Emily, prolific and manic, each poem fluttering to the floor the moment I finish, the ink not yet dry before I begin creating another.
I am Sylvia penning The Bell Jar before I finally break and decide to stick my head in the oven and end it all.
I am Zora, scribbling down my lived experience because the world won't acknowledge it, and would prefer that I remain silent.
I am holding their stories, and mine.
I'm even holding yours.
A message in a digital bottle.
You're welcome.
