In Retrospect

12/03/2025

Presence in a world like this is not a spiritual exercise. It is a political act. It is a refusal to let crisis steal our inner lives.

The speed of our world is its own kind of violence. We are asked to react before we understand. To post before we process. To respond before we feel. We are encouraged to perform urgency instead of practicing care. And this erodes the very things that keep us human. It erodes attention. It erodes the slow unfolding of a life. It erodes the ground that art grows from.

Watching Joel, Robert, and others step away from social media is a reminder that refusing this violence is still possible. Their choice is a form of reclamation. A way of taking back their sense of self from the constant demand to be visible. It made me ask what I want my life to feel like, not what I want it to look like. And that question is changing everything. Because the real danger of performance is not that we confuse others. It is that we lose our ability to tell the truth to ourselves.

It is obvious I am still learning what presence really is. I would not pretend otherwise. But I know for certain it does not come dressed in glamour. Presence does not ask to be admired. It asks to be lived. It cannot be saved, shared, filtered, or branded. It is necessary for love, trust, imagination, community, and healing. Presence holds contradictions without rushing to resolve them. Presence creates the conditions where justice can begin. Presence allows people to gather in real rooms and plan real change.

Yet so many of us cannot remember the last time we lived something without the instinct to narrate it. We try to archive our lives while forgetting to live them. The result is a spiritual thinning that takes something vital away from us.

A people who cannot be present cannot resist effectively. A people who cannot slow down cannot imagine anything better than what they have. A people who perform more than they connect cannot build the kind of solidarity required to survive these times.

Which brings me back to writing. I believe writing is the act of sitting still long enough to hear the small truth behind the larger truth. Writing asks for patience, discomfort, and quiet. But the way we work now forces many writers to create faster than they can feel or grow. It is not only a creative challenge. It is a spiritual loss.

So I want to return to presence. Not as an escape, but as survival. I want my life to unfold in rooms where people speak without worrying about how they sound in the minds of strangers. I want conversations that wander. I want laughter that arrives without a camera ready to catch it.

And this is not to say that I will delete my social media, because the truth is that I cannot afford to do that as an author who is still carving out space in the publishing world of this moment. But two things can be true at once. I can choose to emphasize the offline parts of my life while still using the online world as a vessel for connection rather than an altar for worship, which is what it has quietly become for so many people.