According to Everyone Else...
the profanity of outsourcing meaning
I had this clear memory of outrage directed at the Instagram Top-9.
(a curated grid of your most important images of the year, determined by engagement)
I remember looking at them and thinking, Top-9 according to who-m?
The vast difference between what was most meaningful and what was most engaged-with had never been so obnoxiously clear. One, an inner weather system. The other is a scoreboard built by a machine that likes FACES, bright COLORS, announce-ments, and, possibly, humiliation.
It’s a subtle shift, but a consequential one. The moment something passes through a system it becomes legible in a new way. It acquires a label, a ranking, a place in a hierarchy.
And the way it’s notarized (blegh) always feels like a mild distortion. Not quite wrong, but not quite the whole, living-breathing picture either.
Lately, I’ve been feeling that old Top-9 outrage. My ideas, my work, my experiences, even my calm, getting ranked, summarized, categorized, and handed back to me by structures that were definitely not in the room when the thing happened.
So I’m pausing over two things that have lately been handed back to me in distorted form: my work, and my contentment.
You may recognize this as one of my preferred hobbies: taking something the world has confidently labeled for me (my capacity, my pacing on substack, the way I experience time) and politely refusing the label long enough to look for other options.
I hope that somewhere in my refusals, you find permission to offer yourself more options.
My Film and Where to Place It
According to film festival programmers, my movie is as experimental as they come. In the narrative slot, it’s fractured, cognitively askew structure dregs against the more linear continuity of it’s running mates, and it struggles. As an experimental submission, doors open. The tone shifts ever so slightly from polite dismissal to curious interest. It begins to move.
And then there was the man from Film Forum, who went out of his way to tell me, with a certain condescension, that there was nothing experimental about my film. It was, in his view, a straight narrative. And for that matter, he’s seen my not-so-original idea before in two other films he’ll name here, both esoteric and important and, of which he is a scholar of.
He wasn’t describing the film so much as placing it. Slotting it into a satisfying taxonomy. I could feel his satisfaction in his slotting expertise.
And both pronouncements were delivered with such…assuredness.
Assuredness always shows up dressed like Truth, when really it is just a person enjoying the sound of their own gavel.
you’re wondering, though, how would I categorize my film?
The annoying answer is I don’t experience the film as one thing.
The even more annoying answer is I experience it as the maker of it, which means I see only a series of decisions that, at the time, felt necessary.
So when someone tells me how they would label the outcome of those decisions, I find myself less interested in whether they are right and more interested in what they need it to be; what function the label is serving.
This idea has suited me in not mistaking category placements for descriptions and applies to a myriad of other identity labels in life- more on that later..
The Shape of Nothing Being Wrong
I couldn’t access the fire needed to write through a current emotional hijack for a newsletter because my emotions hadn’t really been hijacked.
Similarly, I felt empty showing up to therapy without anything urgent to bring. No flaming bag of psychic garbage. No relational mysteries.
I was feeling even. I was actively aware of the many things going right.
At first, this felt like a lack of material. For therapy, for writing, for the private investigation bureau I’m operating inside my own chest.
A good week, though, can produce it’s own material. Maybe contentment is not the absence of depth, but the n-e-g-a-t-i-v-e s-p-a-c-e that allows the rest of the picture to take shape.
In a painting, negative space tells you where to look. It gives the object its outline.
And the shape coming into view is what’s working. It’s like being able to see the figure without having to set the background on fire.
It can be helpful not to convert every quiet stretch into a wound just so I have something to say…more on that later..
Circling in on the difference between a label and a living thing…The category comes from the outside and can serve it’s own purpose———- a diagnosis, a genre, a metric, a submission slot, a therapy topic, a Top-9. They help the world sort and file and process and admit or reject.
The aim, then, is to not confuse the sorting mechanism with the thing itself..
Until next time, may your categories be useful, your labels loose, and your inner weather remain gloriously un-notarized,
Abigail
Enjoying the sound of their own gavel!!!!
Who needs labels? Not me!