What's your intention?

Or the autobiography of my time on Bookstagram (thus far), but also a love letter.

“And who among us is not neurotic, and has never complained that they are not understood? Why did you come here, to this place, if not in the hope of being understood, of being in some small way comprehended by your peers, and embraced by them in a fellowship of shared secrets? I don't know about you, but I just want to be held.” - Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey.

I have been a part of the Bookstagram community since 2016. For those who have found me on here who are not a part of the Bookstagram community, I’m referring to the very niche but very large subgroup on Instagram commonly referred to as Bookstagram. It’s a place for book reviews, book hauls, book photos, writers, poets, and creatives that like to hang out online with an emphasis on books. I have absolutely zero idea how I stumbled upon it but I remember who the first few people I followed were. I have since met them and still talk with them from time to time. But let’s rewind. In 2016, I stumbled upon Chloe Caldwell’s, I’ll tell you in person, a collection of essays, which was maybe the first time I formally understood the concept of personal essays. And at the same time got Stephanie Danlers’s debut novel, Sweetbitter. In 2016 I was still doing fashion photography and reading the celebrity memoir here and there. I wish I could remember what made me go to the bookstore that day and buy these books, but I simply don’t know. It’s funny to think back on those times now. The Pre-bookstagram times. This all feels slightly embarrassing to admit now. I can hear the chorus of people in my head saying, “She says she’s a writer and didn’t even know what personal essays formally were until 7 years ago!?” or “How can she be allowed to have a Substack when she didn’t even know about personal essays until a few months before she got a bookstagram?” Essays, as I understood them, were in the context of textbooks in school. At Houston Community College, we read all of our essays out of one of those giant Norton textbooks. I remember reading one when I was 20 titled, “We do abortions here: A nurses story” by Sallie Tisdale. It wasn’t until years later when I read her collection of essays that I realized I had read personal essays in school. I searched my school’s old curriculum and found that they are still teaching that essay. They label it personal accounts. And the object of the lesson is to have a position for or against something. I never had a teacher who explained to me what personal essays were they didn’t even really encourage me to read outside of romance novels or classics like Shakespeare. So anyway, it’s 2016, and I have a copy of Chloe Caldwell’s essays in my hands and I am devouring it, screaming at how much joy it felt to read something so similar to my life. And then the same happened with Stephanie Danler’s novel. What happened next was I probably looked them up on Instagram so I could further transfer my love for their work elsewhere, and see who was behind the words that were changing me. From there I must have found book lovers through suggestions. And once you follow one you follow more and soon you’re engulfed. The more people I talk to online the more tell me they had a similar origin story of how they got here. But is the origin story the same as the intention? The start of something is not always the same reason we continue to do something. But beginnings are beautiful, they hold something pure that is hard to replicate. There’s ignorance to beginnings, an unknowingness, freedom in roaming the aisles of this new journey, running your fingers along the spines of what’s to come. In the collection of lectures titled Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle says “…in the beginning was the act, not the word.” Meaning, beginnings are filled with first steps, ideas, and a jumping into… what follows is the consequence. What follows is intent. Once we jump into the water, we must decide what to do next. The beginning is impulse, instinct, but what will you do after all of that wears off? Do you hope for the impulse to sustain you?

And now, 7 years later I am still on Bookstagram. And this week I have been thinking about intent. I think when I first joined, there was no real intent. I don’t know if I understood it in those terms. I was merely happy to be reading and learning more about books and getting book recommendations from fellow peers. I don’t even think there were as many challenges to participate in then, but if they did I was always dancing around the outskirts of Bookstagram. At first, because I was transitioning my account into a book one. I know the semantics of all this are probably boring to everyone but me, but somehow meticulously uniting the knot of my Bookstagram journey is helping me understand myself better. So, I was dancing around the outskirts. A bystander, more than an active participant at first. Then slowly I started to trade in my fashion magazines with literary books and I altogether quit fashion photography to join the ranks of my fellow aspiring writers. (A long-time dream that I had shelved for the entirety of my life as a pipe dream). When I did become active and created my new Instagram for this purpose there was more intent behind it. I wanted a free space uninterrupted where it’s purely books, writing, and my life (things I thought I couldn’t share before) I have struggled with boxing myself into strict types in the past. And I have always had a hard time understanding how to blend all the different selves on Instagram. Talk about establishing your niche and strategy had been swirling in my head for a while due to trying to grow my fashion photography account, but when I started this new one I wanted something different. And I guess a part of me always knew it was a tool that I could sharpen or use to my advantage. And lately, I have been so curious about how everyone else uses this tool and what their intention with this tool is. For me at first, it was books I shared and film photos and bits of my life, little words here and there. I was free and didn’t care but that’s how beginnings always start. Before you know anything you think you are good, it isn’t until you know more that you are less sure. Once you are in the community you start to see all these brilliant and creative people around you. You start to notice their words and compare them to your own, and well, as the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy.

I have a chronic need to share, an impulse, a bursting out of me. I think of Charles Bukowski’s poem, “So you want to be a writer?”, when he says, “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you, don’t do it.” But I would like to add my amendment to it. That some things don’t come bursting out, sometimes it’s a small leak out and that’s okay too, maybe we have to feed the thing, the creative monster in all of us. Maybe we have to love it and spend time with it—maybe the bursting out looks different on everyone. I wonder what it means to never share a thing, to keep it all locked inside. I don’t know if it’s very human. Surely even if it’s one person, we must share parts of our souls and must expose them to sunlight so they grow healthy. And yet, though it bursts out of me and though I believe in no other way of existing for me, I also hide myself, feel disgusted with myself, like I just binged and purged. I feel annoyed the world knows so much of me, yet nothing at all. Everything is taken out of context. Nothing is the whole picture. 

But perhaps also, this impulse to share is to compensate that I do not want to share. I sometimes loathe sharing what I’m reading for fear that one might project their opinions on it, or alter it somehow for me. But I reject that part of myself and share it regardless of how I feel. I am dishonest with myself. Instead of letting certain parts of my personality remain, I correct them, to what I think is right, both for me and others. But what is right? Who am I pandering to? Is that one of the things immurement in me? That thing Helene Cixous said that is buried alive in all of us. 

For me, Bookstagram was never a replacement or a stone for me to step on though the soles of my shoes have holes in them from having walked around in its world for so long. I don’t know what I came to seek. I was 24 then. I was hammering away on my typewriter, sure that I was writing my first novel. And maybe I was, those typed pages lay in a folder in my library somewhere. Sometimes I come back to them sure I will do something with them. In due time, in due time. Im letting the pressure build as Hemingway said, and maybe I am also letting it build up so it will burst out of me when it’s ready.

While I have read my whole life, I didn’t dedicate my life to books. I read the usual growing up; Junie B. Jones, Amelia Bedelia, I could list a million children’s books, Harry Potter, etc. I have read every Chicken Soup for the Soul book and in my teens hung out in the drug addiction memoir section. Then I read random celebrity memoirs and business/ spiritual/Christian books. I loved going to the Trident bookstore in Boston to stare in awe at all the books. I would pull off the shelf what title stuck out to me as I didn’t really know any authors at the time. I don’t really go to the bookstores anymore and stare in awe. They have become a little more mechanical and transactional, a place that holds the things I want. 

I think in some way I will forever be indebted to Bookstagram and maybe that’s why it’s hard for me to step away from it too. It taught me so much about literature. It was the first time I saw people explaining books in depth, but more than that it was the first time I saw people talking about how they felt about what they just read. I got introduced to literary fiction (I thought all fiction was romance novels or sci-fi) I knew about the classics but had no connection to them, no understanding of what made a classic a classic, what a canon is, what all the literary prizes were, etc. Soon I started speaking only in Bookstagram jargon. NYRB that and Didion this. I was immersed in another world that has shaped my world so much I can’t see one without the other. This community has helped shape my voice in some roundabout way. Bookstagram was my school, it opened the door and now I am ravenous for my writers. I love too much, I take possession and now I carry what I think is the only copy of any author’s book in my heart. To share it feels like one is ripping it out of my hands. To share it feels like I have to murder myself first. And yet, I sacrifice all of this because I want to be loved. And yet, I regret it immediately like when you let go of a love too soon, knowing you can never return, and seeing someone else with them. There’s a pang in my chest. All my old lost loves of literature. 

My brain spins like a Rolodex and I see everyone from this community all the time. So many people have imprinted themselves onto me that when I look at certain books I think of them even if I have never met them. I often wonder where all the people who used to be regulars went, but a friend of mine reminded me that eventually some of us grow out of this space. She said she needs this space less, now that she has a boyfriend and a dog and personal career achievements, and a solid group of friends. This was just a stepping stone for her. For so many people. I said it felt like she was graduating and I’m still stuck in school. I still remember when people shouted into the void in the early days of Bookstagram, complaining that no one was engaging with them. And now the cycle repeats. I remember the redheaded writer named Cassie, who recommended the book Madness, Rack, and Honey. I remember she was frustrated with Bookstagram then, all those years ago. She would mention feeling like the space was competitive and she eventually left. There are so many similar stories I have like hers. I remember the girl who wrote her daily to-do lists and shared them with us on her stories and eventually separated from her husband. I have met Bookstagrammers in restaurants and coffee shops. I have met some who let me crash at their apartment. I have now seen the influx of BG creators who seem to mostly care about numbers and growth. For what, I wonder? What is their intent? Is this a stepping stone for them too? I have seen scandals of BG people plagiarizing book reviews to gain followers so they can switch to lifestyle influencing. I wonder what the beginning was for all of them, that blissful place where everything seemed simple. I wonder when intent became monetized. I too get swooped up in metrics as I have said here before too many times. It can feel like we are all rushing to post something on the bulletin board at school but not looking at anyone else’s and wondering where everyone is. I have pushed myself for this community in ways I didn’t know I could. I sold some books, I sold some of my photography prints. I created a monthly series where I did a calendar book shoot. I never ended up monetizing that or publishing it because my intent was never that. It was just pure fun to do until it wasn’t. Until I got burnt out. But the community supported me, and cheered me on, just like they continue to do with my writing. 

And while I am in a phase of my life with the focus of intent, I am trying to remember the beginning, the start. Intent is harsh, I want to sprinkle some pure impulse in there too. And while I’ll never be able to walk through a bookstore blindly, I hope I can always remember why I love reading and who I am reading for (me.) I have read this quote that Thich That Hanh reiterates from Sung master Qingdeng countless times but it never gets old, “Before I began to practice, mountains were mountains, and rivers were rivers. After I began to practice, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. Now I have practiced for some time, and mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers.” Books were just books but now they are galaxies, worlds that await me. They are food and water for the brain, they are the only thing running through my veins. So much so that I don’t know who I am when I’m not reading— when there isn’t a book near me. I am a bad addict for words and I stop at nothing when I am trying to make sense of them in my writing. And eventually, maybe, they will return to just books. All of life is a cycle, but I don’t think in one’s lifetime something can be returned completely as it was. After you release something from your grip of deep connection and concentration, there’s a knowing there, which was otherwise empty. The calm after the storm. And while I might not solely rely on BG to feed me books anymore, it’s turned into something more than that for me, a community with resources and people who are helping me keep my mind sharp. I am still figuring out this next chapter, and what the intent looks like for me, but now, I have a rested knowingness in my heart.