Girl Offline: I Feel Less Like Talking, More Like Listening - The Gloss Magazine

Girl Offline: I Feel Less Like Talking, More Like Listening

As this wild, strange year draws steadily to a close, the habits of the internet show themselves: the Christmas decorations of my timeline are posts detailing things we’ve achieved this year, our top 9 posts on Instagram – charts depicting how our engagement with our followers – or friends, or following, or audience – has changed. How many people clicked the heart under your photos this year? How many pairs of eyes on you? By you, I mean me. I almost always mean me when I say you.

I also see long lists of personal achievement, threads of fresh bylines, interesting work accumulated, careers growing. These are the strings of lights we wind around the dark of the winter, the death of a year and the breech of a new one. This week in particular, Spotify released their Spotify Wrapped metrics – individualised data that compiles what we’ve listened to all year into cute little graphs laid out in Insta Story friendly format. Everyone was listening to Pillow Queens and Ariana, by the looks of it, which are great calls. It’s lovely to see the minutes totalled – this is how many minutes of music you listened to is a strange metric to measure your life by but an unusually lovely one. A year mathematically compiled into minutes of tunes in your ears is a hopeful thing, somehow.

I haven’t done it yet. I don’t know if I will. My old account got hijacked by someone who really liked EDM and long readings of holy books in another language and thus my service became unusable no matter what I did, so I just opened a new one a few months ago. I know what I’ve been listening to for the last two months – largely the same music I’ve listened to the same handful of albums, the same weird smattering of songs, over and over again. Every so often I remember the existence of a song that holds particular meaning and go through a real serious listening-to-Phoenix-on-repeat period, but largely I live without music in my ears. I find myself sounding more like a space alien than usual in my insistence – and I am immovable on this – that music is kind of too much for me. All these feelings. All these other people’s feelings in my ears. When I listen to music I am very totally listening, and unfortunately, very totally feeling. So it’s a sometimes-experience for me. I’ll work that one out, someday. Until then, the neon celebration of other folks’ music taste is glitter-strewn across my social channels.

I don’t think I’ll be sharing much about my year in retrospect, my 2019 wrapped. In the not-too-distant past of social media, I used to write little posts around New Year’s Eve, slamming the memories I had of the respective years into winding statement, then share it for people to find themselves in the memory-stream, and also, to make sure everyone knew I’d had an interesting year. That I was truly living my 20s. That I had not wasted my time and I had, in fact, had an awfully big adventure. I hesitate to go back and read them again, mostly because I can’t stand my own voice from more than three tweets ago, but also because the performance of an interesting life doesn’t just… make it real. This is before Instagram, when our performances became more nuanced, more drip-fed to the world. In these Bebo and Facebook posts, I would metaphorically stand on a chair in front of the party tipping my fizzy wine flute with a teaspoon so I could tell everyone what a wild and invigorating year I’d just had and they really should just make the next season of Skins about me, personally.

I feel like I was more fluent in talking about my life as it happened back then. Something staggered me, gave me pause, though I don’t know what that was. Perhaps that’s the strange thing about being of the generation who came of age alongside the internet – first dial up at eleven, my adolescence teemed alongside Web 1.0 then into 2.0 and the dawn of social media. Now as the internet belongs more wholly to the digital natives who never knew a world without it, I feel less like talking, more like listening. I am on the cusp of wiping my (entirely inactive) Facebook account from the face of the internet, so no trace of who that loud, mad girl was remains. The right to be forgotten is a real thing, isn’t it? I’ll likely download the contents of the account and store them away, on the off-chance some curious grandchild wanted to see what her Nana was like as a deeply intense 23 year old. All those recaps of all those years, gone. I don’t feel anything, thinking about it. Maybe that means it’s time.

In these last few weeks leading into the beginning of 2020, a fresh decade, I’m trying to opt out of that pantomime. I know I’ve had a year. A grown-up, floundering, exhausting year: a good year. A year. Alive. I’m not sure that condensing it into nine photographs that received the most attention actually helps me, or anyone else. I’m not sure that compiling my life into data makes me feel good at all. I do get pleasure from seeing the folks in my life reflect on the year that has just passed them, but maybe that’s because I’ve grown into someone who would prefer to stand in the kitchen applauding than stand on the chair. I’m ready to applaud until my hands fall off, frankly. I’m also ready to cozy into the dark of December and work out what this year meant to me on paper, in private, in silence. The parts of this year that live on, live on. There are more than nine bright hours to look back at, I think – but I’m really trying not to count. Just to feel, instead.

Newsletter

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This