An Alternative to the Instagram Grid
Early last year, I quit Instagram and LinkedIn. It wasn't for political reasons like many others who were leaving IG at that time. I was just uncomfortable with the ingrained inauthenticity that came with those platforms. I didn't have many followers and whether I was right or wrong, I didn't feel like the ones I had were able to see the real me, then or in the future, anyway. To make matters worse, many of them were my former colleagues, so I felt like I was performing a role that I had long since walked away from.
I tried to start fresh on Bluesky and Cara. My follower count never grew, so each post felt like a muffled shout into the void of a busy marketplace. Eventually, I realized that it didn't matter what platform I used. It was the structure of a social media feed that didn't work for me. I wanted to share the things that gave me joy in a pure and heart-felt way but social media was triggering my insecurities and my childhood need for validation. I was probably empathically picking up the energy of others who felt the same way as well. So again, I quit those platforms and decided to make my own image gallery without followers or likes.
It was a complicated quest because I wanted to use the gallery as a portfolio for my creative hobbies but also as a place to share what I found beautiful in the world. My triggered ego would tell me that I was arrogant and was just trying to show off when I wasn't a professional photographer or crafter, but my heart would say that the world's beauty is found outside and inside me. I am the observer and the vessel for the beauty that reaches me and the tools I used did not define the value of that beauty. What helped me through my dissonance was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote that "love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
My image gallery is an expression of my love and my search for love. But the true love I seek can only be found when the visitor is ready to see the beauty in me and resonate with the lens of beauty that I use to see the world. Its name Glimpses of a World That Holds Me shows that even though individual glimpses may be brief, many glimpses together make an impression. Similarly, our lives may not be always beautiful, but our existence is always a resonance of divine beauty.
Since the gallery is static, I needed a place to share my ongoing glimpses. It isn't a perfect solution, but I can use this blog for that. The caveat, however, is that I need to integrate my two identities: the me who can step back to write high-level philosophy from the position of an observer of humanity, and the other, the messy, vulnerable me who longs to love and be loved, and like an innocent child, wants to share little moments of beauty and wonder with anyone and everyone. To make this possible, I now have two feeds in the menu: Philosophy and Postcards. You can find the high-level me and the grounded me as two separate threads, but together, you will find me in my totality.