Unfinished Conversations

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My dear gingerbread people of the world,

It’s December, and calendars are busy. That’s what the weeks leading up to Christmas are like – going to parties, rushing around to buy stuff, attending weddings, and visiting friends and family who have travelled to the city for the holidays.

It was one such evening in the year 2012, the date was December 16th. My family and I were stuck in traffic on the way home from a party in Colaba. The streets were adorned with twinkling lights, signalling the proximity of Christmas. We had carols playing in the car. And although I don’t remember the exact context, at one point in the conversation, my mum said,

“We’re in the vicinity of Christmas.”

I know she was referring to the fact that it was mid-December and the atmosphere was undoubtedly festive. But at that point, all I was thinking about was what to name my Facebook album. I had 89 shiny new photos to upload from that party (God I love 2012!!) and immediately thought – In the vicinity of Christmas! Perfect!!!

It’s so weird how moments happen, but that became a moment for me. ‘The vicinity of Christmas’ morphed into a yearly ritual that I observe quietly on my own. It’s like a fun deadline for me. By that date, I expect to be drowning in Christmas spirit. Carols, fluffy socks, making Christmas sweets and cookies, evenings under pretty lights, Christmas bazaars, parties, all the good stuff.

The vicinity of Christmas, on December 16th, is a personal tradition. A timestamp in my secret calendar.

The vicinity of Christmas last year

As December 16th loomed on the horizon last year, I knew things would be different. The hallmark ‘vicinity of Christmas’ vibes, seemed elusive, obscured by the fog of recent life changes.

My whole world had been transformed by the arrival of my daughter, only about two and a half months prior. Plus, we had just moved house. Our new home was still in a state of limbo, with half-unpacked suitcases languishing in corners.

And to grace this disarray, a smattering of Christmas decorations dotted our living room. Their presence was more of a token gesture than anything meaningful or intentional. But amidst all the meh, there was a silver lining.

We had planned a trip to visit our family for holidays, where I discovered an unexpected gift – the ability to piggyback on Christmas cheer, and the many joys of borrowed festivities. It was a balm to my disoriented spirit. 

Nevertheless, I can’t help but remember how that pivotal date, December 16th, the vicinity of Christmas, passed me by that year.

The vicinity of Christmas THIS year

This year, I was determined to make up for it. This year, I was settled in my role as a mum. This year, I was settled in my home. I wasn’t sleepy or in a haze any longer. This year, we set up a magnificent tree, and put decorations all over the house. This year, I baked cookies, visited friends, bought presents, did an advent calendar devotional, and had the joy of attending many Christmas events.

I’m happy to report, that the vicinity has been glorious!

And while I was soaking up all the joy of the season, I thought back to last year. I thought about what I was doing around this time, and how I was feeling. To jog my memory a bit, I jumped into my photo gallery from December 2022, expecting a visual confirmation of my disengaged state. 

Surprisingly, the images told a different story: festivities, mulled wine, decorations, snapshots of parties. Interesting, I thought. I pulled up my Instagram story archives to double check, and of course, they mirrored this.

They portrayed a season rich in Christmas spirit, a stark contrast to my internal narrative. Since you already know where this is going, I’ll spare you the bridge-building.

I engage, therefore I am

This discrepancies between real-life, memory, and digital record reminded me of an essay I wrote about how taking pictures for our archives can mess stuff up. When we divert our attention to capturing rather than experiencing, we alter how we remember things.

Emotion and attention are the twin pillars of memory formation. Emotions serve as anchors, tying our experiences to a more profound level of our consciousness. Attention allows us to focus and encode these experiences into our memories.

When we prioritize capturing a moment over experiencing it, our attention is split, and the moment loses some of the emotional depth.

This phenomenon can lead to curated memories that are not entirely faithful to the actual experience, but are instead influenced by how we chose to document them and share them. 

The photos and videos we capture and share become the primary artifacts of our memory, sometimes overshadowing actual experiences.

The images in my gallery, though reflective of Christmas, lacked the essence of my lived experience. The act of taking pictures, especially to post online, had shifted my engagement from a first-person experience to a third-person curation.

Fortunately, I still remembered the season for what it truly was – I wasn’t fooled by my own gallery – but the contrast between how I felt and how I documented it made me think more deliberately about how we exist online.

I’ve been writing about internet culture and what it does to our sense of self for a while now. Every time I think of talking about what a force for good it can be, I get lost in the weeds. But this isn’t another essay to lecture everyone on being more authentic online. That simply isn’t possible.

As far as authenticity goes – what struck me was NOT the fact that I had lots of Christmassy pictures from a year where I didn’t feel particularly festive. I know why I took those pictures – I wasn’t trying to deceive my audience or myself. I was trying to cherish whatever I found that helped me feel Christmassy. I was trying to engineer the vibes.

What struck me was that I had NO pictures of anything else.

I had no pictures to represent me NOT feeling festive. I had no pictures of a regular, non-Christmassy day. I had no record of a quiet happy morning at home with my baby. No pictures to represent how I spent my afternoons and nights after she went to bed. And while you might argue that not everything needs to be documented, and that we’re supposed to use our brains to use to remember life – the fact is that more and more people find it easier to cognitively offload that work and use our digital world for memory archival.

During those non-festive weeks, I was probably doing nothing, and while it’s possible to do nothing and still exist in real life, that isn’t true for our digital lives.

You can’t just BE.

The internet demands active engagement. Unlike the real world, where you can sit back and simply exist, the digital world requires action, interaction, and participation. If the real-world mantra is “I think, therefore I am,” the digital world’s mantra seems to be “I engage, therefore I am.”

Our uneventful, mundane moments that don’t require acknowledgment from a broader audience, or don’t merit a photograph, sometimes feel like they vanish into oblivion. But the scary part is that they are inherently valuable to our personal narrative – far more valuable than the picture-perfect moments, I’d argue.

I began thinking about this at the beach last weekend. It was a slightly muggy day, and my legs were sticky but I sat down on the sand anyway. So much sand was stuck to my legs.

I watched my daughter scoop sand into a little sparkly bucket. Further down towards the shore, there was a mother putting sunscreen on her child. The shack beside us had a volleyball net set up, and there were five guys playing a game. The ball bounced off towards a jogger, who tossed it back to them.

And nobody took a picture or recorded any of this. You don’t get to witness these moments online. They’re absent from our digital narratives, even though they’re the ones that make up most of our lives, and perhaps resonate most deeply with our daily human experience.

I think about this as I take a sip of a beer. My main job is to make sure there aren’t any ants crawling near my daughter and I.

I give her a gingerbread man as a snack, and hope the crumbs don’t draw the attention of more ants. The sunset is fairly unremarkable that day, but I’m happy to witness it anyway. 

The clouds made an interesting pattern. So I take a picture of it and put it on my Instagram story. That’s all that exists in my digital archives from that day.