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At the height of my hubris, I thought of starting some kind of writing collective.

I thought that since I have a website, and more space than I'll ever need when it comes to displaying text, I could invite a bunch of interested people to write serials alongside me. We could all get together and like, i dunno-- do talent incubator shit? It was a stupid idea. I basically immediately realized that this wasn't anything-- I would be terrible to work with, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for anyone else's work or deal with the expectations that people might have on me to critique or edit their work. But for a moment, I mourned that I *wasn't* the kind of person who could do this. That I would not have been able to make this work and I did not even allow myself to try. That I knew, immediately, that it wasn't me. That I'm not a community builder.

Sometimes I think about somebody pulling a cheap gotcha on me by saying that for a supposed marxist I'm isolationist and unfriendly. That I call myself "anti-social." Where is your community at, "communist"? Hee hee hoo. Anyway. It's a silly thing to imagine obviously. The thing is, the material reality is the same whether I'm nice or not. The system of capitalism was still precisely dissected and laid bare by Marx, and anti-colonialism and communist state function was further expanded since his time-- I'd be a communist regardless of whether I'm an asshole or a social butterfly because I've seen and experienced the ravages of capitalism and colonialism and I know what analysis speaks actual truth to me. But besides that, I also know that I'm difficult to get along with and don't relish social interactions much except with a few chosen people. When it comes to the "talk to your neighbors" spiel we're all getting now, I think it is qualitatively better if I wasn't the one talking to anyone. I tend to get carried away with my passions and get too intense and scare normal people away. Let's get someone else on that.

I used to be really active on social media. I was an early adopter of twitter and tumblr. It was neat to be able to talk to not just Americans but people from around the world. I talked openly my politics throughout. I made a few friends, lost most people who became acquainted with me, ended up on several blocklists, alienated a lot of normies, and then I just kinda stopped saying anything. For the past several years I've had a dwindling interest in social media. The cyclical, unproductive negativity these systems incentivize-- it became increasingly obvious it was all a waste of time. I've already had every argument that an active user of these sites would tend to have on a recurring daily to weekly basis and I've never learned a thing from them.

Once I stopped posting my fiery rhetoric I basically just retweeted sexually attractive anime women, posted about gacha games and then I closed my public accounts for good eventually.

I couldn't think of what to say anymore. And in fact, I could already presuppose, before saying anything, that I'd get a tedious response. So why waste my time?

However, the reality is, if you retreat from almost everyone and make yourself deliberately hard to reach, then, well-- you won't have many friends of course. Bluesky, a twitter competitor, has this feature of making lists and feeds that you can easily plug into to follow or block or just see the posts of a curated set of people. I saw people on Bluesky sharing lists-- lists of writers, gamedevs, cultural critics, people who post cat photos, etc. It was an act of collection and sharing that for whatever reason caught more than my passing attention and made me feel a sort of melancholy about my own social media use. If you're like me, you're not on any of those lists. Nobody knows you're around, and nobody knows what you do. You don't end up on the list of writers-- you *deliberately* don't post about your writing so the outcome is pretty obvious isn't it? But it's more than that. You also miss out on, well, doing things with groups of people. The vaunted "Community"! Some of those lists, those circles, represent people who are part of a conversation where they share with each other, learn things, expand each other's experience. I've made a few friends, for example, who each know a ton of people in video games criticism and podcasting-- even some people I used to admire a lot back in the day on social media. I've been part of some huge discords lately. People who know people, people who love to share their thoughts with others-- and I've become someone who knows nobody and says nothing.

I've been told by loved ones that I can be an extreme person. I used to overshare too much, and now I don't want to say anything.

Moreso than being on the lists, I sometimes wish I could talk to all the people on them and "be part of what they are a part of". Of course, this is extremely silly-- I can do that, nobody is stopping me except myself. (Setting aside that some random person joining a conversation between friends and colleagues online just kinda looks bad anyway nowadays.) But the barriers that you believe you can see, the walls you believe you can touch, are harder than any real granite and glass that might actually be there. If you've chosen the walls, you have to know how to operate the bulldozer to topple them-- and I don't think anyone can really help you break those. You just "gotta do it" I guess. Even after writing all of this, I don't know that I would.

After all, I'm already thinking of all the ways this would just end up bitter anyway.

The other day, I wrote a post about my feelings about the post-election world. A friend of mine shared that post on their social media with my permission and I was surprised at the response. I presupposed nobody would really care-- either they understand this kind of thing already or they disagree with it. I wrote it to do my own processing of my own feelings-- I understand myself better through writing than any other way. That's also why I'm writing THIS post now. Writing where someone can see it gives things stakes that make me think harder about what I'm feeling and saying. Anyway-- It was touching to hear that people not only resonated with it but it helped some folks to process their own feelings and think about their own future.

In the process of writing Unjust Depths I'd received, when I allowed myself to receive such a things, a lot of touching little things about what the story did for people. Some folks credit me for their dawning communist views. Some people tell me I led them to start HRT. Some people told me that the stories of the characters I wrote made them feel bolder in dressing femme or butch or living their lives more boldly, less scared. I was always surprised and touched each time. But it's really only recently that I've been thinking about these positive interactions I've had. I've started actually posting on bluesky and not hiding that I'm madiha yes that madiha the unjust depths madiha-- but I don't really put it out there. I'm not linking it here, for example. I don't know why. When I think about the worst case scenario, it's someone being annoying or insulting. It can be draining, but is it worth foreclosing on other interactions?

Well-- I guess I don't actually know what the ratio would be, of positivity to negativity. Some things just aren't an immortal science.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this stuff. I dunno. I'm on bsky. I don't want to use my former account anymore, but I'll keep using my current one, I guess.

Maybe eventually I'll figure this stuff out and become a social butterfly and I'll have so many friends and do so many things with them.

But I'm as I said before "a paranoid fatalist" so I think actually the likely outcome of this post is like, I dunno. Being killed in real life.