“And now the railings fall away
And the stencils draw a face
Our outlines in the sunset
Are just a fragile silhouette.”
—“Reflections are Protection,” La Roux
It can take an entire lifetime to qualify and quantify the life of an artist. Even after life, when the bodies of artists are laid to rest, their souls transcended, generations of successors are oftentimes left to wonder. Therefore, there is no greater time than any to explore our way—audaciously, cacophonously, and voraciously—through digital forums and social media. I myself have been doing this since its inception. I was one of the first few millions of subscribers to discover the emerging beauty community of YouTube—all the way back in 2010. At the time, watching makeup videos—especially for someone as unconcerned with femininity and the whole of gender identity as I was then—seemed to me absolutely asinine, oxymoronic, and tangential.
The paradox I found while watching Michelle Phan on YouTube—one of the most irreverent and most-watched beauty and cosplay content creators at the time—was the fact that makeup was a countercurrent to biology. With just a few brushes, creams, shadows, and pigments, one could become subterranean and extraterrestrial; something subhuman and humanistic all at once; something which both embodied, unabashedly conformed with and commentated against form and function. Little did I know, I was on a quick path to making a career out of the interesting juxtaposition that lies in artistic and linguistic form and function; conformity-commentary snapshots of reality. Needless to say, by 2012, I had my name and plans cemented; elexified.
When I began this Spring 2022 semester of “Writing for Social Media,” almost ten years after creating the word, image, and brand of elexified, I thought I knew exactly how things would expand upon the original elexified brand. Little did I know that elexified was fated to change structurally. I cellularly and metaphysically explored what it meant to be, embody, and become “infinitely infectious energy.” I revered Instagram as a “powerhouse” social media tool through which I could unearth the complexities of my mind (and eidetic memory); however, I did not expect Twitter to become a sibling to Instagram; aid in representing my “digital diary.”
Both Instagram and Twitter became essential elexified tools as I chased the silhouettes of artistic origins; commentaries on being and the sordid idea of achieving human immortality by way of captivating words and intellectual prowess. What I discovered on this quest was almost oxymoronically two-fold. Not only was the plight of being an artist who comes once in a generation destined to design a new lexicon, but that artist would never and will never fit within the confines of four corners: whether that be a book, a phone, a laptop, or any digital screen.
My relationship to language and my own lexicon of words became ferociously and incessantly hungry—as I looked up every single new word and philosophical term which came across my eyes and ears this semester. Oftentimes, I would open my Google Chrome app and see nearly 100 tabs of things I hadn’t finished perusing; new words, terms, and articles shared with me that I had saved for later. Ironically, an incredible disgust accompanied this insatiable hunger—as I quickly realized the utter irrelevance of my artistry depending on a front-facing “pretty” element.
I desired to be in the thick of getting my hands and mind dirty—and began to abhor any time I exploited my natural aesthetics, face, or body in order to receive external validation and likes on-screen. I wanted nothing more than to dissociate myself from my external looks and become the voice of elexified—which is why I struggled both morally and philosophically with “YouTube week.” In my eyes, I had already tried and flubbed any budding YouTube career by the end of 2016. Little did I know, YouTube would represent the biggest area for growth potential.
Life—much like social media—is constantly in flux and overwhelmed by a myriad of societally-curated stimulants. Not to sound super Hegelian, Hobbes-ian, or Orwell-ian in my cryptic depiction of reality, but to be quite honest, we are at constant risk of mental handicap by way of digital manipulation: the media we consume; the posts we like and share; for fuck’s sake, the SMS messages and audio messages we send. (This semester, I started making this joke of “Steve Jobs, delete that,” any time I said something too "divisive" and my phone was near.) Our brains and our screens are constantly on, communicating; buzzing with neurotic-psychotic influence.
There is little to no recompense within this madness; moments where we shut everything off and down and simply connect with our being; develop foundations by planting feet on to ground, pens to paper. This is why we need things which affect us cellularly like the wind: sway our minds and bewilder us so delicious-delightfully that all we can do is humbly and wholeheartedly submit to the impassioned feeling they evoke; turn our eyes and ears inward as we quench to empathize more.
Much like the philosophies of Hegel state, I do agree: we are cellularly and structurally fated to only learn the pitfalls of a generation once that time has passed; however, that doesn’t mean we are fated to make permanent homes of ignorance and entitlement. I am the first person to cite the capitalist junk which pervades our societal perceptions—and expectations imposed on both artistry and being. Believe me; h o w e v e r, the mere tale of the Marxist pessimist is one tired and old; it stands to be reclaimed and subverted as something metaphysical and positive.
Oftentimes, it can be hard to separate the identity from the individual, but this is the path we must forage in order to gain true enlightenment; true influence; true personal power. Society and social media have both found cheeky ways to divide us through all of these aestheticized-individualized identity initiatives: saying Black Lives Matter for only all of February; saying women and their voices suddenly matter, but only for the month of March; saying queer and trans lives matter, but my God, not for one day past the month of June. Everything is radical, positive, material, and influential—as long as it can be transformed and converted to commodifiable product and profit.
The biggest thing I have learned from leaning into my infinity as a creator: life can be miserable as capitalism and systems of oppression consistently threaten to rob us of our temperament, sanity, artistic and intellectual property; souls, even. But most of the time, we are all just simply gluttons for punishment. In a world where society allows us to both speak and be so egregiously-incorrectly spoken for, there are still too many of us who surrender to silence, thinking our voices will be rendered too angry and/or unimportant “when it truly comes down to it.” Truly comes down to what? Fight or flight? Life or death? It’s inconsequential to split these hairs.
Art has become censored in the same way basic language has—and it’s so devastating to realize. So many of us do not pursue the art we were destined to create out of terrorized fear it is not marketable enough—most of us in this class, even. The thing that makes it “all worth it,” “when it comes down to it” is the constant quest to squeeze rendered-controversial narratives in. Yes, to be so cringily cliché, demand “our seat at the table.” But I want more than a mere seat at a table; I want the table, made from the finest African woods. I want everyone to know I can foot the bill.
The truly depressing part of being an infinitely multifaceted artist and content creator: seeing the lengths people go to in order to both self-sabotage and censor themselves, myself included. The biggest depressant: completing my senior Capstone project where some of my friends I once viewed as the epitome of social justice and change surrendered themselves to an ever-genteel, submissive tone of professionalism; weeded out the candor-filled, vitriolic speech I revered and respected them for as they named zero names and cited zero sources for their traumas. Most disproportionately and disparagingly of all: Black and Black, queer women made little to no room for the critical conversation I wanted to have about the infrastructure of higher education.
The once viscerally impassioned “yaaaaases” to Capstone interviews became dodgy “how about May’s” and “I want to be a part of this, but being friends with you, it’s not that it weighs on me or depresses me, but, I just couldn’t frequently interact with you and navigate my own shit.”
And this happened, time and month again, for four months straight regardless of any identity marker and/or instance of societal marginalization. What also ironically happened within this four-month—what seemed like “core”—rejection period: incessant critiques of my artistry and being; being rushed to conform to friends’ and partners’ timelines when their lives remained unchanged and perpetually ever-fuckin’ miserable. I found this idiosyncrasy hilarious, but only months after being made completely sick-to-the-point-of-destruction in both head and stomach.
We have been conditioned to think that truly unearthing our opinion is too much; there is a societally correct amount of posts within a day someone is allowed to make before it’s seen as a cause for mental health concern—of which we only send the ever-ineffectual, elusive, and overall non-committal “U okay?” texts to anyway. We have been conditioned to think our opinions don’t matter; we won’t be heard no matter the vulnerability we expose or the empathy we illicit. I used to be the epitome of this inhibited thinking: somehow confining myself to aesthetic impossibles of 3x3 squares, impossibly finite word counts, and videos of 15 minutes or less. HOW FOOLISH!
There’s an ironic interlink of breath and speech which occurs each time one unabashedly airs truth. The fact of the matter is we are, have always been, and always will be: heard and received. Whether or not we stand to matter after we’ve been heard and received is entirely a different matter; something well above us in the nebulous stratosphere of narcissism and persona. The biggest thing I’ve learned from my social media classmates and peers: stop presuming I will not be heard and that I do not matter. People often hear me and discard me; that is not my problem. Moreover, people often seek to benefit from my emotional-empathetic battery so they can infantilize me in their narratives. Imagine that world: where I’m simply a character in someone’s story and not the protagonist of my own success. How absolutely insane it would be to settle for such mediocrity and misrepresentation of myself, in all my beauty and complexity.
That’s when I realized two things: we have to incessantly document our stories and communities; sometimes it doesn’t matter if we do. You can give people a platform; they can use it to pour gasoline on themselves before igniting their tongues with a lighter. Two words: Trump tweets. Nevertheless, most of the poetic and prosaic learning I achieved over this semester was provided by narrowing my lenses on perspective and point of view. I got so tired—and quite frankly bored—of using the second-person point of view to vilify these so-called oppressors of mine. Oppress me they did, but leave it there—as either a semicolon or period—they certainly did not.
I could write books on these evil villains—evil demons as Descartes would say—and the open, infected wounds they inflicted upon me. I could divulge endless epithets about therapy sessions where I thought healing was finally becoming linear and one word would trigger me off the highway in a Cruella De Vil-esque crash. (Maybe it’s too soon after my accident for a metaphor like this, but I’m sticking to it.) The point is: why would I cement anyone as simply a fixture in my narrative when I could use the confines and concision of poetry to question the very nature of the form itself? It is once I asked myself this question when elexified truly became infinite.
My first blog posts were devoted to declarations: questioning poetry as what it is and is not to the point where poetry itself became infinite. Once poetry itself became infinite, I craved the same freedom for myself. I began to work through the cores of every outlet of artistic expression I have dabbled in until they all married; separated from and divorced themselves of conformity. I broke down every declarative, conviction, and assumption I had about artistry until I took a seat at a queer fork in the road: The Y-shaped intersection of knowledge and belief. I knew the only way to fuse knowledge with belief was to breathe every cell of myself: inhale peace, exhale revolution.
As far as the future of elexified is concerned, all I can confidently claim is: I dare to remember. While I refuse to label myself as inherently better or superior to all of the people who have rejected me while providing commentaries on my being over the course of this semester, I do think I am inherently stronger than absolutely all of them. While they aired sordid philosophies, perceptions, unsolicited advice, and critiques on my being, none of them did so soberly. Even within the case of people who partook in not a single drag of nicotine, THC, drop of alcoholic drink, drug, or pill, every last one of them drunkenly drank juices of their own self-hatred. The people who were addicts of any kind, whether to substances or their relationship with food, were worse off than the ones addicted to remaining numb and unfeeling; actively boring and passively dejected.
I, on the other hand, dared to remember it all, stone-cold sober in the end—suffering microtears as I dutifully tweezed shards of glass out of my eyes, ears, and throat to confidently voice pure truth. I mostly did it alienated and isolated, too—resorting to solitude while metaphysically surrounded by sound in a full-bodied, atmospheric way. On my daily commutes to school or work, I would blow the bass out of my car to feel sonic vibrations in my veins. When I was anywhere stationary or standing, I put AirPods headphones in my ears with the Noise Cancellation function on. I wanted to be completely embodied by artistry by way of complete devotion to sound and meter.
As far as the future of elexified is concerned, all I can confidently assert is: I plan to provide an uncensored lens on color through infinite conversation and intertextuality. I am no longer afraid of my creative capacity—or the potential of my written work being stolen. So much of my artistic, intellectual property and mental health have been stolen, without my consent, by various peers, professors, and capitalist “superiors” of mine. Nothing can happen to me that could truly disparage; razzle-dazzle me; or wow me with the little humanity and morality a human being can possess. Contrary to the beliefs of industrialists and capitalists, there is no way to recreate the experience of elexified which simply comes straight from the hands which type this reflection.
I plan to use my hands—and the powerful voice they can translate to text—to create a multidisciplinary rendering of the chemistry of color. I plan to continue to strike conversations as more than the persona of elexified, but as the brand of everything I’ve built while embodying the “infinitely infectious energy” that is me. I am going to use the scope of elexified to juxtapose the never-before done: makeup and poetry as visual and vocal mediums. I am going to collaborate professionally and artistically with as many schools of thought as possible in order to venture into the chemistry of color: history; philosophy; psychology. It is going to take a cohort of artists, intellectuals; the best classicists and historians; actors, writers, and editors. It is going to take a lifetime of learning and unlearning. It is going to take a lifetime of boldness, courage; rebellion.
An ancient Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, believed that all human beings were born with spermata; all comprised of deliciously human seeds which bound them as human beings with nous, minds. Cellularly; literally; philosophically, we are all matter. Hence, by nature, the cells, spirit; mind, and soul of a human being will always matter. Subjectively, the identity of a human being may or may not matter to whoever is looking; the words of the human being may matter to that beholder even less. As Erykah Badu says in “Other Side of the Revolution,” “peace out to revolution.” There can be peace after revolution; inhalation of peace, exhalation of revolution.
We have to reinvent the timeline of a breath. We owe it to ourselves to heal by way of breath and meditation. We must subvert Earth and time by becoming one with the wind. Talk that shit; send out those Instagram posts full of “nothing;” send out those philosophical tweets. In the end, every post we send out is our feeble attempt at documentation—and getting the story straight. To be cringily cliché yet again, when time is up and we’ve become Hegelian, our time will be read to successors as “us” vs. “them.” Why let “them” misrepresent us for yet another generation?
As I said when answering Dr. Laist’s questions which formed the basis of his article “Student Artist Explores the Chemistry of Color,” artists are the courageous historians who chase silhouettes; capture their still images. As I asked interviewees as a final prompt within my interviews, “if you could somehow be reincarnated as an inanimate object, which one would you be and why?” My answer changed from its original “paintbrush” to its eventual permanent resting place in “the wind.” I aspire to move through time and space as the wind: embodying and allowing myself to absorb and learn from every direction; weightless in words and infinitely felt.
Grassroots community building can only be done by cultural liaisons; human synthesizers. While I don’t think grassroots community building can solely be done while nestled in some pretentious collegiate office corner, I think it is a start to demanding access to conversations most marginalized people have been having all of their lives in private—but have been publicly denied a space within. While I don’t think grassroots community building can solely be done while nestled in the heart of an inner-city—where oftentimes the “wants and needs of the community” are to remain disbanded—I think it is a start of a blessed Bildungsroman to have been born in one (the Bronx) and raised in another (Bridgeport). It is my destiny, as the wind, to blow peace and harmony through every space I am blessed to reside within—whether that be a document, picture, city, street, classroom, conversation, or poem. I’ll be there, elexifying.
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