What's The Best Way to Reach You (Newsletter No. 13)

I was looking at my Spotify searching for a playlist to play during my shower and swiped through station names like “Daily Mix,” that send me through the same crooked circles of the same songs I love until I’m sick of them, “Best New Hits” That I know are mostly filled with calculated bravado and generic backbeats and that leave me empty.  Discover Weekly is sometimes great, and other times they choose indistinguishable croon-y R&B indie ballads and I’m like, just because I liked that one doesn’t mean that’s the reason I liked that song.

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 I wrote an email reply where Gmail tried to predict or suggest every next phrase and breath.  To make my life easier and less thoughtful.

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Right before my shower I saw another post on Instagram where someone wrote a long vulnerable caption about anxiety below a photo of themselves. Below that followers thanking her for being “so real.”  The very faintest stomach drop that the poster probably isn’t having this conversation so thoroughly in person.

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It made me feel a little trapped and insane. 

Are there no more things left where they’re not telling me what I like?

 No more things left where they’re not telling me what I “should” do?  

Do we even know who we are? What we even want to do that isn’t constantly for the quick spark of validation that loops over and over again input, output , input output.  I am not a robot. I reject. I refuse.