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mariowithmercy · 4 days ago

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Deleting Instagram Part 2

I recently had a moment of clarity, during a spontaneous trip to go snowboarding that I had been putting off for way too long. I was at a coffee shop journaling and I accidentally fell into a flow (I was in Boulder of course *eye roll*… Boulder does that to me), so I busted out my laptop and wrote a whole ass essay about how I was going to delete my instagram accounts (Deleting Instagram & Tik Tok Part 1). I have 2... well, technically 3: one public, one private, and one... uh, something else. One for the world to see. One for people I trust. And one for... uhh, something else..

Public Account

I call it my mask account. The one I use when I meet someone new and they ask me for my instagram, to connect, because people are weird now and they don’t exchange phone numbers, even though they give their phone number to every company in the world. I don’t get it. You’ll give your number to Whole Foods before you give it to me?

The public one is the one I feel comfortable showing strangers. It’s also the one I give to people I’m attracted to. It has pictures of me looking all cute and shit, presentable, cleaned up, my good sides. Because I’m scared to give them my private account, I’m scared to show them the real me, the crazy me, the sitting on the bathroom floor after throwing up me, ya I post that kind of shit… Me posing for a camera in great lighting wearing my best outfit, clicking away until I get ‘the one’ just.. it doesn’t feel right to me, it feels weird, a performance, a show. But I guess the show works. Or does it? I feel like if I show them the real stuff, they’ll get turned off and think I’m a freak, and I don’t want that.

Is it me? Am I just too insecure? Do I need to just accept myself and put myself out there? Ya maybe, that’s part of it. But the other part of it is that it’s the fucking norm to present this kind of mask, your best side, your bright shiny makeup did pose at the top of the mountain side. It’s fake as shit. We’re so used to seeing masks on social media and presenting our own masks, that when someone like me presents something more raw and real, it’s like… “wtf is wrong with you bro.. Mario are u like ok??” NO IM NOT OKAY! I HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA POISONING!

Private Account

My private account is my Rinsta, the real me, the one I’m afraid to show people. The one that is TMI and NSFW and a whole bunch of other acronyms. I created it about 6 months ago. It was originally for posting music, which is also something I was afraid of. The account was long overdue. I had already created a YouTube and an email account to give this musician in me some space to exist, but like the snowboarding trip, I put it off. I waited.. and waited. I was scared! I was afraid to put myself out there in that way. I was terrified to let the cat out of the bag: Surprise! Mario is a freak! and he screams about wanting to kill himself over rap-metal beats!

This person, this character, this… ?, has been begging to come out of me for awhile. I think I learned to tuck it away a long time ago. It wasn’t allowed to exist at home or school or anywhere really, so he went underground, deep inside, into some far away cave underneath my colon. I imagine him like a prisoner that’s been exiled to Siberia, or a caveman who got solidified in ice during the Ice Age. Somebody like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, isolated, begging for human contact, turning volleyballs into his best friends (I prefer trees tho).

I was planning to let the cat out of the bag a few years ago, but it's been a slow process. I’ve been so afraid. So afraid of what people might think. So afraid of the embarrassment. I’m really insecure, and it’s SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATING!! AHHH!

What am I so insecure about?? you might be thinking, well I am.. I’m insecure about being a big bright loud crazy weird person, one that tells dirty jokes, walks around barefoot and maybe naked on occasion, one that screams spontaneously like he’s got Tourettes. Hey! that kinda sounds like me! The problem is— I feel like I’m too old to be that, which sounds funny as I type this, because that’s exactly what I was told as a kid! “Stop acting like that, you’re too old!” My mother would scream at me whenever I raised my voice or made a joke or did something inappropriate aka out of the box aka not ‘normal’, so I held it in. I learned to be a good little boy, a quiet reserved well mannered people pleaser. If I was too old when I was 8, then I’m fucking ancient now.. I feel like I’m in a prison trying to act my age in this goddamn society. What’s wrong with you people? Why are you all trying to grow up and push people to grow up?? I can’t do it anymore..

I’ve been plotting my rise to fame as an artist for some time, I won’t lie, and I’m not gonna feel embarrassed about it, it is what it is, I’m not proud of it either, I’m just observing. And part of that plot was to leave digital breadcrumbs of my past, a past that I fought tooth and nail to erase from my mind and the digital sphere. I figured I would let people dig through my digital history and see how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed… that’s the marketer in me, he’s always 2 steps ahead like that, plotting. He’s the evil genius with a long nose standing over a desk at 2am with nothing but a table lamp illuminating obsessive notes and diagrams sprawled over the table. He wants to make me a star, whatever that means.

The Old Me Account

So there’s a fourth account too technically, the old me account. I almost forgot about him, @tonesomething. I changed so much, that I felt like I had to start fresh, so I did, but I kept the account active because I thought it would be a cool way to show my past. I keep trying to tell my fucking story, in so many different ways, it’s really annoying, I keep catching myself doing that. Why?! Why Mario??? Or Tone?? Whatever your name is.

“He doesn’t exist anymore” I would tell people when they greeted me by my old name, my dead name. At the time, I had honestly felt like I killed him off, the old me, I guess that’s how I coped with the change.

I wrote “dead” in the bio of the profile and I let it rot into the wretched black soil that is the digital void, the cemetery of dead people’s instagram accounts. I’m really fascinated how we have access to people’s social media profiles after they pass, there’s something very.. amusing about it. Maybe in the future we won’t have the patience to drive to a grave site, so we’ll just have to visit someone’s online profile and type “RIP” in the comments and then move on, and get back to scrolling down our feeds.

And yet, here I am, still typing, still posting.

(Just fuckin do it Mario. Delete the goddamn account!)

I did! I did!

Well, technically I deactivated my Public Account last night, my mask, which means it isn’t dead but like it’s on life support.

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mariowithmercy · 5 days ago

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Deleting Instagram & Tik Tok Part 1

I feel like I should delete all my social media except Tumblr. It’s been poisoning my mind and body, I find myself constantly having thoughts about what to post, what to share, how to present myself… and then the notifications, and the messages, and the comments. I find my mind mulling over a lot of these things often, and it’s directly correlated to how much I post and how often I open the app, which recently has been increasing as I post more and message more people.

I miss the mental clarity I had before being on social media as much and posting as much. My mind is so much more cluttered these days and chaotic. It’s harder to focus, it’s harder to create, to write, to hear musical ideas get dropped into my consciousness, to be more present with people. My mind is constantly thinking about the next thing to post, how a post I shared is doing, the results, LOL, the fucking results of a pic of me sitting on a bench looking at the camera in one of my favorite outfits, how stupid is that?! so stupid..

It came to me this morning after meditating and a spontaneous weekend getaway to Boulder. I’ve been slowing down since I got here. I really needed it after a few weeks of stress building up in my system.

When it came to me, it was a quiet voice, almost a whisper, while journaling. I was terrified to hear it, this voice, this message, this knowing. I didn’t want to hear it, not at all. Deleting my social media would throw a massive wrench into my plans, my master plan to share music and art and develop a following so that I can be a working artist and fulfill my dreams of being a successful musician and writer and actor. I need social media to share my work and build my brand and share my story and my personality and find an audience, so I thought, so was the plan..

I’ve been using instagram and Tiktok a lot more recently to share things. Things I’ve been doing the past couple years. I have a ton of stuff thats accumulated over that time. I wasn’t active on social media, I wasn’t sharing anything. Partly because I’ve been focused on creating, but also because I wasn’t feeling secure as a creative to share my work. It can be extremely vulnerable to share my stuff, it comes from a deep and personal place. All the things I’ve been making: photos, videos, short films, film scripts, writing, paintings, interior design projects, audio conversations, they’ve been sitting in my computer. I’ve been hiding, afraid to share my work, what I’ve been doing with my time, and… my true self. My true self is embedded in the work!

I vividly remember the moment I decided to be an Artist with a capital “A”. I was lost at the time, very lost, wandering around the streets of Soho taking pictures, looking for work, looking for friends, looking for community… looking for a path. I was drawn to the bright lights and entertainment, a hub for creatives and artists and cool people doing cool things, making it happen. I wanted in. I wanted to be apart of it. I knew that. I just didn’t know how.

My experience in college at U of O, studying business and marketing and sports marketing left me disillusioned. It took me awhile to realize that that path was all wrong. I didn’t realize until my final year. Before that point, I was working my ass off trying to set myself up for a successful career. Then all of sudden, it made me sick to my stomach. Because I was off. I was really off.

I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was lost without a path forward. But in hindsight, I had been lost long before then. Because I was making decisions the wrong way long before then. I became what I was conditioned to be and a watered down version of myself. I put on a mask. A mask that I thought would bring me success and bring me to the top of the ladder, where I had envisioned myself.

Why am I talking about all this? I’m practically diving into my life’s story… because it’s related! it’s all related to social media! Social media is how we present ourselves in the world to others and it influences who we choose to be. The act of posting on instagram or any platform (but especially that one) is an act of deciding how I want others to see me. It’s how I communicate to people who I am, what I look like, what I do, how I think. I’m literally building an online version of myself, my identity. How could I ever capture all of me in that way? Atleast in an authentic way? There’s no way! I’ve been trying. That’s why I’m deleting it.

There’s also a cost for being active on social media. A mental toll. The thoughts and worries and fakeness and positioning and social statusing. I’ve been trying to present my authentic self on social media and share my work but it’s really fucking hard. There’s not enough posts in the world that could encapsulate all of me. I’m a human, I’m complex… and I’m changing, always, constantly, evolving in better and worse ways. I’m not static. Not like a post. Or a profile feed. It puts me into a box and ties me to older versions of myself and holds me back from being free. Because at any one moment in time, we can be anybody… if we’re not so tied to the identity we’ve worked so hard to create and then monetize on social media. And I’m talking about everybody, not just people who use social media to make money or for business purposes. It turns all of us into a product and a brand, at-least the current popular platofrms. I rather be free of all that bullshit and all the games that come with it. I don’t want to play those games anymore. I realized that the last time I left social media like 5 years ago. I only returned because I thought I had to, in order to be a successful Artist.

At one point I changed my instagram profile to an “Artist” account, which requires you to make your personal account into a business account, which then gives you deeper insights and capabilities for posting. I felt very liberated when I changed it to “Artist”. It felt like a stamp that I finally earned, that I finally felt confident enough to own. I had been creating art in various ways for years and I was starting to see the value in my work and my ability as a creator. And I was also finally becoming secure enough to share work, work that wasn’t perfect. That took me a long time. I was deathly afraid of sharing. Afraid of judgement. Afraid of exposing my art and true feelings, which was often very intense, and deep, and personal, and full of wounds.

When I decided I wanted to be an artist, it felt like a light bulb moment. I was walking home from manhattan. I was finding myself, I was finding my creative self, something that had been dormant. I didn’t explore the arts or my creative side growing up. It just didn’t happen. I wasn’t in that kind of environment, at all. So the more I explored it, the more it became a bigger part of my life, and then… it was time to decide. ‘Who are you gonna be? What are you gonna do with your life?’ It was time to choose what career I would pursue, what path I would walk. For some reason in my mind it was a black and white decision. A crossroads. A decision for the rest of my adult life. And I chose Artist.

Being an artist can be difficult. It can be really hard to make a living from your artwork, especially if you don’t come from a family or a background that had one and can show you the way. I had no idea how to be an Artist, literally none, I still kinda don’t, everything I knew has been mostly gathered through reading books and watching interviews on youtube and studying my hero’s. There were no artists or working creatives close to me.

Once I felt capable of calling myself an Artist (which sadly took a very very long time, that word Artist was so loaded for me), it quickly became a huge part of my identity, maybe even all of my identity. It became who I was. It became apart of how I dressed, how I presented myself, how I thought of myself, how I moved in society.

I had a different identity before that, a much different one, I was…. a Businessman. Dun-dun-dunnn *Cue the dramatic music*. That’s the word I use to encapsulate who I thought myself to be. My dad was one. My family valued them. I felt like I was smart and business savy enough and entrepreneurial, so I could be one too, a great one even. A Businessman meant I was professional, I was a Somebody, I was smart and capable, and I could wear suits, and make a lot of money, and be admired, someone important.

I now realize that when I decided to become an Artist, a deep part of me was just desperate, desperate to be Something, Someone, and also desperate to cling to an identity, one that already exists, one with a path forward.

I was lost, really fucking lost, and it scared the shit out of me! Terrified me! I felt like a chicken running around with its head cut off. I felt like I needed to choose a life, an entire life, at the age of 24! The first thing I chose, Businessman, was completely wrong, so wrong, I fucked up, I knew that. So I threw it out. All of it. I even threw out my vision board I made in college. I had to be someone else in order to fit inside that vision, that identity, that life. But an Artist? that sounds great! That sounds expansive! That’s exciting! And I was finding out that I was creative, very creative, and that I love art, and that I love making art, and that most of my hero’s were artists, and their lives look really cool…

On a deeper level (one I didn’t know at the time), I loved the attention my heros got from people. People loved them and the work they made. I loved them and their work deeply touched me, it changed my life, I want to do that, I thought, I want to touch people like that too. (And on a deeper unconscious level: I want to be loved like that too.)

Underneath it all was a desperate attempt to become someone special and important, so that I could feel special and important, and receive the love I didn’t get. So I didn’t just want to be an Artist, no, I wanted to be a very successful Artist, a very loved Artist.

The path to being a ‘successful’ Artist means getting your work out there and getting it in front of people. And so naturally I thought I needed social media to do that. It makes complete logical sense. So I started using again, and sharing. But what if I don’t need to be a successful Artist? What then?

Then I guess I would say fuck all of this stupid fake shit that clutters my mind and takes a lot of energy to participate in, and I would delete it.. and go back to creating, for the love of it, because I love making music and writing and making things. And I would let go of trying to build a following and a career… But… But.. it’s do damn hard to let go! (fear just struck me as I typed this). I don’t want to let go. I planned my future around this. This is my dream..

Who am I without this dream?

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