The world is not your bubble

Which is good to remember

Last night, while texting with a friend, I made a casual reference to the sea of watermelon emojis that had overtaken my social media feed.

My friend had no idea what I was talking about.

It was almost inconceivable to me that this Free Palestine symbol that had become a standard feature of my online world over the past month was utterly unknown to someone I care deeply about; and yet, here was living proof. The feed that I see online, one dominated by pro-Palestinian activism, was not what he sees online. To be honest, I don’t even think he sees very much about the war at all.

I don’t really want to talk about the war in this essay (at least some of these essays have to be war free), but that moment — like many moments over the past few weeks — was such a clarifying one, a reminder, yet again, that the world I have created online is not the only one that exists. More than that, the world that I exist in online is entirely of my own creation: I can edit it as I choose to create the world I would like to see.

We often hear of this in negative terms: the bubbles that isolate us from dissenting views, the red pilled extremists who watch YouTube video after YouTube video and eventually conclude that children are being abused in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza place (one that doesn’t even have a basement). But in this painful and tender moment, I am trying to remember something else: we can build the online worlds that serve, not to cut us off from the reality of the world, but to serve as an oasis from it, a soothing balm in the midst of pain.

It can be challenging to do that as a bisexual. Queer spaces are easy to find, of course, but as we all know, queer spaces are frequently biphobic. And merely seeking out other bisexuals is no guarantee either: for years the only bi resources I knew of were utterly anathema to me, peddling sappy, corny messaging that did not resonate with me at all.

But I still believe that it is possible — to be honest, I believe that it is necessary — to create spaces for ourselves that reflect the kinds of communities we wish to see. The world is harsh enough; it is critical that we have spaces where we are not judged, where it is simply okay to be.

I write this newsletter in the hopes of giving some of you that space. Hopefully it is working, because we need it now more than ever.