Tough advice, right? It's hard to move lightly when I feel deeply but sometimes the pieces are delicate, pieces of my heart or someone else's. Or perhaps the situation is precarious.

I'm in a perpetually precarious spot currently, learning to hover lightly over my life and not get fussed when I can't see too far ahead. Currently I have plans through November and after that my life is a mystery. My career is changing, which is good; and even though it means starting over in certain regards I'm actually excited about it. I'll take the severe pay cuts and knowing I'll make a lot of mistakes in order to learn something new. 

Also, I started this photo project right before I turned 46 and I'm about to turn 47.  That's another strange and precarious position, to have a birthday and look forward to another year while looking back on this one. But it's fall in the northern hemisphere and that's my favorite time of year so it sweetens the prospect of getting older and feeling conflicted about it.. 

Finally, I like the way the windows in this picture make me think of a film strip. An outtake of my present day.

I hope all of you in the blogosphere are doing something sweet for yourselves today. XOX

I'm in that weird in between space where I haven't worked for a couple weeks but I'm also not settled into a routine in any one place.

​Being in one place for any length of time isn't my forte in the best of times but I have so many agendas to fulfill in the next couple of weeks that I feel a bit scattered. I'm trying to find the balance between all the work and travel I've scheduled over the next couple months and all the other projects (like this one) that I'd like to pay some attention to. 

Additionally, I've spent this past week with my family, all of whom are delightful but demanding, and I have a trip to Asia starting tomorrow. So yeah... I'm carpe-ing all the diems like crazy..  

I woke up to the news that my IG account had been enabled again. They said the disabling was "accidental," which is strange, right? Also strange is that I didn't have to go through the rigamarole of taking my picture with my screen name and email and whatever else to prove that I'm an actual person and not a Russian troll bot. Normally the identifying picture is part of the reinstallation process but instead I just emailed the IG "i believe my account was disabled in error" office about a dozen times protesting that I hadn't broken any rules and apparently they agreed with me,

I'm grateful. Obviously. But still annoyed that a project I've worked on for a year can be obliterated by "accident."  While I know that my social media constructs are fragile and that I still exist if they disappear, I still had an unsettling feeling of being untethered when this IG account disappeared. As if part of me was gone too. 

I had dinner with my sister last night and we talked about social media. She has a 13-year-old girl and fortunately, this little niece of mine is an aberration in current society. She doesn't post much on social media, she takes no selfies, she rarely checks her phone and forgets to text me back and she somehow manages to be a sweet goofy awkward kid who is universally liked by different groups of students in her school while identifying with no clique in particular. 

We should all be so lucky as to be this kid. 

I'm going to make an effort to borrow her spirit in the coming weeks. Put my phone down more, care less about likes and visits and all the ephemeral constructs of online life and just take pictures for the fun of it.  

The beginning is always today.

IG disabled my AnnieSavoyWrites account this week. The "violation of community standards" link pops up when I try to get in. 

My first reaction to that link was shame, That terrible middle school feeling of getting kicked out of the club and told that I'm not cool enough to play with the other kids anymore. 

Weirdly, my second reaction was relief. I felt relieved of the burden of censoring my pictures to suit IGs whims and blocking and defending and monitoring my comments and DMs the way all sex bloggers have to do. 

But then I got right around to anger. My well developed sense of fairness is outraged  and confused. Why would my little account catch anyone's attention?  I'm careful(ish) about the rules. I've had a couple pictures removed but I don't try to poke the IG bear by posting content that flagrantly flouts the "community standards."

I suppose none of that matters. I've been on IG long enough to know that the rules are arbitrarily enforced and once an account catches the eye of Sauron, so to speak, you're fucked. I can argue that other accounts post much sexier and more naked pictures than mine but what's the point of that argument? And who would I even make that argument to? 

​All these feelings tap into a deep well of tiredness. Exhausted by society's everlasting hypocrisy towards sex and nudity, drained by fighting the long social media fight to be recognized and seen only to be eliminated after a year and disgusted at the sensation that I'm only a pawn in a game of censorship that I'll never win. I could spend all day every day screaming "THIS IS ART" and my pictures will still be seen as pornography worthy of elimination.

The whole situation makes me the most angry because there's no recourse. The faceless corporation of IG provides no clear way to fight their rulings and the fact that they can just muzzle people at whim is deeply upsetting.

Of course there are other picture sharing platforms with fewer parameters but my feelings about social media are so mixed currently that I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed.