#10 & We’re Still Having Fun
I’ve reached my 10th issue of Diaspora Eyes since July 1, which means I’ve managed to publish something every week for the last 2.5 months and I’m thrilled! #LittleWins (Actually, this is a big win for me!)
True to my first post, each issue has been about something different. Some have been poems and some have been random streams of consciousness. I shared my brief take on Beyoncé’s Renaissance and my thoughts on “impressionist photos.” I even shared my micro-play “Before Sunset” that I wrote and directed!
I can’t say that Diaspora Eyes has taken any particular shape or form since starting and I do beat myself up about whether I’m pulling a very Gen-Z move and just posting ~ vibes ~ or whatever, but also who cares? The main point of starting Diaspora Eyes was to commit myself to sharing my creative output somewhere consistently. What that really boils down to is pushing myself to create in a way that feels true to me.
I’m working a lot of stuff out in my head right now: where I want to be in life, what I want to do now that I’ve committed to this writing thing, how to stop worrying about what others will think about my writing—all the existential things that eat away at you…forever.
So I’m treating Diaspora Eyes as a creative playground for all the mental machinations. And the thing about play is, the stakes are so much lower. I’m letting loose, ignoring the critic who lives rent-free in my head. I see the typo and I decide it’s no big deal for two whole days before I go back and fix it!
The truth is, I’ve been writing and being creative on the Internet my whole life. When I was in middle school, I got in huge trouble because my parents found a blog post I’d written on a now defunct web blog site called Xanga where I complained about whatever it is 12-year-olds complain about. My favorite thing about MySpace was designing my page down to the HTML with such intention. I graduated high school with about 800 people, and a few of us who loved to write poetry gravitated towards one another on Facebook and would tag each other in our poems. (I still think my high school poetry features some of my best work because I was a broken-hearted, yet surprisingly wise 15-year-old who had just been dumped by the hot, mysterious athlete at a different school.)
Along with a junior year AP English trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tumblr was one of my first entry points into visual appreciation, including the NSFW kind (IYKYK). Twitter popped on the scene before I graduated high school and I was spewing off the (now wisely deleted) ramblings of a 17-year-old know-it-all back when Twitter jail was still a thing and retweeting was more popular than “liking.” I made a Blogspot in college before I moved on to a free Wordpress version to archive more of my poems.
Photographer, musician, writer & film director Gordon Parks shot by David Finn
It wasn’t until I got on Medium that I started trying to write in a more standard personal essay style. Several of my stories got picked up and distributed on the platform and it was through publishing stories I spent time researching and writing that I found the courage to share more. But as I’m growing into my self-identity as a writer, and dare I say, artist, I’m still figuring out what my style is.
A quote I love from photographer and multi-hyphenate Gordon Parks goes: “In my youth, violence became my enemy. Photography, writing, music and film are the weapons I use against it.” Violence against my people and our planet is still the enemy and I am drawn to all of the same weapons Parks used to fight back. Diaspora Eyes is the space I’m creating to work out all that nervous energy as I move intuitively towards my personal style of art-making.
I had a lot of anxiety about starting Diaspora Eyes, and most of it centered around disappointing myself yet again by failing to be consistent on a personal goal I set for myself around my creative work. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, and I’m working through some of it now in therapy, but it’s always there in the back of my head. That’s why this time, I had to drop the expectations.
The only rule is to share once a week. Doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t need to be the perfect, buttoned-up pieces I was trying to emulate on Medium. Doesn’t need to be about one specific topic. Doesn’t even need to look a certain way. I’m just playing. Throwing paint at the wall. Expressing myself in all my colors.
And I’m having a lot of fun so far.