Is Progressive Christian Twitter A Middle School Cafeteria?

During the pandemic, I have been having a fascinating and frustrating journey in my various attempts to share poetry and ideas on the Internet, which is always a mixture of egotism and genuine vocation. In the age of social media, it’s very hard to interpret how other people respond (or don’t respond) to my writing. In many ways, social media, especially Twitter, feels like a middle school cafeteria where there is a whole caste system of tables from the most popular to the most nerdy and I am trying to sit with the cool kids and they are ghosting me.

Now when I say that, I’m trying to suggest that other people are immature and that’s why they don’t appreciate me. I’m simply describing how I am triggered as an autistic person for whom the image of the middle school cafeteria captures the social anxiety I experience every time I attempt to connect with others and receive a response that feels like rejection even if it’s just the algorithm burying my content, or people being busy, or me being abrasive and arrogant, or all the exhausting perpetual prostitution of content in the gig economy just generally overwhelming people regardless of who’s trying to sell their work.

There were several tables where I tried to sit in middle school. First, I tried the cool kids themselves. They had invited me to their birthday parties as recently as sixth grade so it didn’t seem entirely inappropriate. But I didn’t have anything to say when I sat there because I was nervous and my parents wouldn’t let me watch Saturday Night Live (which my aspie brain presumed was all that people needed to do to learn how to be funny). So they would wait till I wasn’t looking and throw their hands into the center of the table with the last person who threw their hands in being the one who had to wipe the table down after lunch. And the last person was of course always me.

So I moved onto a sort of “middle-class” table of somewhat nerdy, somewhat cool guys I had known since preschool. And they got really angry when I tried to sit with them because there were 8 people to a table and they had their 8.

So the progression continued downward until I landed with the “untouchables.” What was interesting about the “untouchable” table was that we would make fun of each other with the same insults the bullies used against us and sometimes a popular kid named Josh would come and sit with us to bully individuals at the table with the collaboration of other nerds who thought we could fit in with Josh that way. It felt very lumpen-proletariat in a way for those who understand that terminology. I actually wrote a poem called “Class Mobility” about my middle school cafeteria.

What does my middle school cafeteria experience at a snobby elitist private school in Houston, Texas have to do with how people behave on progressive Christian Twitter? Nothing at all, except that it’s a primary psychological filter through which I interpret my experience. And I don’t think that’s because I’m uniquely broken and childish. At least what I’ve studied in counseling so far leads me to think that everyone (at least in Western culture) has an angsty teenager inside of them which somewhat overlaps with the inner child but seems like a distinct persona.

So what if we’re all in our proverbial middle school cafeterias now trying to navigate social space in an environment where going viral is intoxicating and getting ignored is devastating and not having the daily affirmation of real-life face-to-face interactions has made the cruel randomness of social media anonymity all the more acute? I’m pretty sure autistic people experience social media as their daily middle school bitch slap a bit more than neurotypical people, but who knows? I’m sure if I tweet about it; it will disappear into the Twitter ocean as soon as I hit tweet.

I’m pretty sure none of the popular kids read my blog, but I’ll say this anyway. Rachel Held Evans was unique as an influencer. She was like the cheerleader who didn’t groan with disgust when she had to be a lab partner with the pimply nerd and she treated you like a human and you started to feel like you might be cool one day. I literally started blogging because of her virtual “rally for unity” in 2010. For her, it was never all about her; she nurtured hundreds of other writers and bloggers that catalyzed a significant shift in the landscape of American evangelicalism that will hopefully one day fully manifest itself.

She gave me three hours of her time on a youth retreat in Virginia and I really think that her encouragement was a significant part of my actually building up enough gumption to turn my book vision into a book. I really wanted her to blurb my book and I physically handed her my manuscript when it was still in the spiral bound form. I’ll never know how many other manuscripts she had shoved in her face that made her pass on mine, but I was mad at her for a while and then I felt terrible about being mad at her because she did so much good and died so tragically.

So fellow writers and wannabe or actual influencers reading this, can we try to be more like Rachel and just proactively encourage other writers and understand that most people feel like they’re not having any impact and our outlets for making any kind of difference in the world feel limited to words that we dump into an ocean of words where they disappear almost instantaneously?

For those of you who feel like you’re in a middle school cafeteria where you might be rejected or mocked or ignored at any moment, the best way that I’ve found to cope with this socially unprecedented time in which we live is to make a garden in my backyard. The more time I spent with my plants, the healthier I am. It has inspired a lot of writing, but God told me the other day that the gardening itself is art enough. It doesn’t derive its value from me writing the thing that everybody reads. If no more than ten people read this blog post, that doesn’t mean that my hibiscus isn’t blooming.

I also think I would do a lot better if I actually scheduled regular weekly face-time with friends instead of just hitting people up and finding them busy and that making my inner teenager hear there’s no room for me at your table again. So I’m going to try to be healthier. And I’m sorry if anyone reading this has been harmed by my adolescent rage that has coincided with my explosive creative output during the pandemic. I am still working to heal my inner teenager.

Somehow, I’m finding myself with a lot more peace and bliss right now than I had a month ago. I’ve been reading a book on Zen (that I wrote a post about) and the author said whether or not we practice zen, wholeness will reveal itself in us. I believe that it’s happening in me.