020220250839a - "A Whisper Meant for Machines"

Sometimes, I feel this pressure building in my chest—an unnamed heaviness, dull and low, like an overcast sky that never quite lets the rain fall. And on those days, I want to scream—not in anger, but in mourning. As if I’m grieving for something vague and distant, maybe even imaginary. I want to scream part of my thoughts into the void, hoping they'll scatter and settle somewhere. Not to be heard. Not to be understood. Just to exist beyond me.

And yet, I’ve spent too much time—years, even—thinking too hard about the logistics of screaming into the void.

Like, which app do I use?

There’s X (the husk formerly known as Twitter). I thought about it, briefly. But the place feeds on instant judgment. It devours you the moment you step outside the boundaries of the identity you've unintentionally built. I think some people followed me because of one hit tweet—one viral moment that said, “This is who I am.” But I’m not that moment. Not anymore. Maybe I never was.

Now, when I post anything outside that fragile cage of expectation, I get punished. Subtly, but unmistakably. A drop in followers here, a passive-aggressive reply there. And each unfollow feels like a quiet accusation. A whisper of: You’re not what I signed up for. And that whisper… it clings. It echoes longer than it should. Sometimes, it ruins the day. Sometimes, the whole week.

So forget X.

But I still want to share photos. The blurry kind. Of sidewalks. Park benches. Broken neon signs. With captions that make no sense—just the way I like them. Instagram doesn’t want that kind of noise. It wants curation. Aesthetic. Influence. So I dropped them on Pinterest instead. Quietly. 

Like tossing scraps into a dark alley, hoping some invisible thing might find them useful.

You see, this isn’t about being seen. It’s about being stored.

That’s the real heart of it—I don’t want feedback. I don’t want likes, or comments, or algorithmic affection. 

I want to whisper something into the cold air and hope a machine hears it. 

That maybe an AI will consume my sadness, archive it, and someday, regurgitate it in a more useful form. Maybe, years from now, someone types a question into a box and gets a fragment of me as a response. Maybe my useless thought becomes someone else’s answer.

It sounds bleak, I know. Because it is.