Ghost in the machine
There’s little peace to be had when you dive into your own archive.
‘Ghost in the machine’ is written by kieran cutting. they are a designer, facilitator, and researcher who writes poetry and prose about weird and haunted things. they can be found all over the internet as @kierancutting, @kierankaleidoscope, or at their website.
I have the (mis)fortune of an expansive self-archive. Sure, we all have the full-to-bursting Google Photos and the embarrassing Facebook account we’ve deleted or hidden. But for me, there are richer fragments – notebooks, videos, old online diaries. I’m haunted by the traces of the person that I used to be. Their outline stares at me through the screen, digital shrapnel of long-past explosions. Each diary entry a too-loud-yet-ignored emotion, each video an attempt to make sense of myself. An inventory of chances to confess to being myself.
When I was sixteen, I picked up a camera and started recording.
I guess it’s time to just… start making videos. I’ve been trying to make videos for about seven months now. That hasn’t gone particularly well. This might not get uploaded, which has happened a couple of times before. Who knows. (August 15th, 2012)
So began my on and off relationship with YouTube. For the next two years – through Sixth Form – I made videos with some degree of regularity. When I went to uni, I intended to carry on, but life got in the way, as it inevitably does. I made relatively few videos over the next few years, before filming my accidentally-final video entitled ‘why do I even make videos omg’ (March 19th, 2017). The video opens with me, laid on my bed in my third year house, recording on a webcam: “So, I made a rather terrible choice today.”
A hundred and forty videos or so fill the space and time between these moments. In the early videos, you meet a clean-shaven, short-haired Kieran, desperate to have their voice heard by someone for the first time. Listen to me, I’m interesting, I promise. In the final video, a lightly bearded, freshly-trimmed, and noticeably older kieran announces that they “don’t get a huge kick out of video-making anymore. It’s just not where I’m at really. So. Thank you. I don’t know why I’m thanking you. I just don’t make videos anymore. So… goodbye. God, I have to find the stop button now.” It’s not the point of the video – they’re just ranting about their dissertation, really – but it functions as an unofficial final chapter to the YouTube portion of their life. Over the course of five years and 140ish videos, you see Kieran get more anxious, then less anxious; more confident in their video-making ability, then care less about their video-making ability. Time is a circle, and vlogs of your teenage self are no exception.
I started making videos because I wanted my voice to matter. I wanted to be important. To make an impact on the world. I wanted people to see my videos and feel differently about their own existence. I was obsessed with being deep. If you asked me at the time, I probably wouldn’t have been as lucid about it. Well, I did ask me at the time. In ‘RE: Why YouTube? tag’ (March 20th, 2013), Kieran says that they started making videos because “I was on study leave and I wanted something to do - and I was sort of going through some weird emotional shit at the time”. They’re being coy here. They’ve just endured a month or so of anxious self-reflection, self-imposed hermitage over the long summer months. Staring into a front-facing camera was the way they learned to practice confession. On your knees, before the screen. Tell your secrets to the internet. It’s not a parasocial relationship if you know who’s watching.
I attempted to daily vlog my first year of uni. I was unsuccessful. This second daily vlog is entitled “I AM SO BUSY” (September 17th, 2014). I look visibly unwell throughout each video on the channel containing these daily vlogs. My first year bedroom goes through various states of disarray. My flatmate leaves and I am sad. I talk for eleven minutes at 1am about nothing at an incredibly fast pace (October 22nd, 2014). You see a working class boy finally able to have autonomy over his own environment and time, mentally declining whilst he tries to make friends and find his place in the world. What a beautiful timelapse. See shy insecure child turn into over-caffeinated hipster adult, right before your very eyes.
When they put down the camera, they picked up a pen. Anxious musings start filling the pages of dozens of different notebooks.
I’ve been at university for a week now and I am having increasing mental cloudiness. Writing this - taking stock of my life, and where I am mentally, intellectually and emotionally - is my hope to re-sane-ify myself. (September 22nd, 2014)
I wonder about legacies at the moment. I watched the deleted scenes of How I Met Your Mother and I think maybe why I didn’t like the ending is that it makes me worry I’ll end up the same: full of regret and nostalgia. Where is life going? Now that I’m in uni, I’m in – I guess – the latter part of my life. I need to move past my previous mindset, which wants to cling to everything I had. I think in terms of groups. Us, my friends. But most of life isn’t like that. (December 8th, 2014)
I don’t know why I have an obsession with teen movies or coming of age movies. I think maybe it’s because I haven’t yet ‘come of age’. Sometimes I convince myself that I’ve arrived, that I have, but I obviously haven’t. What am I searching for? I think it’s experiences. Experiences that fit into a narrative that I can remember. But I think more than anything it’s friendship. I want to break into people’s souls and steal parts of them. It sounds weird, I know. Someone once said to me that I only do the things I do because people praise me for them. At the time, I didn’t think that was true, but maybe it was. Maybe not now, but it was. So who am I? I don’t really know. I’m struggling. (February 18th, 2015)
Identity is still playing on my mind a lot. Who are we? How are we defined? I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake. Am I at the right university? Surely it should be easier to make friends than this. Everyone else has. Why haven’t I? (March 13th, 2015)
The perspective that I have but Kieran doesn’t is the gift of hindsight. Hindsight isn’t quite 2020 – because who could’ve foreseen a year of sourdough starters and government-mandated walks – but it’s close enough. I didn’t want to ‘make an impact on the world’. I wanted someone to listen to me. To hear me. Know me. Without that, I always thought I’d find revelation and revolution whilst losing my head in the back of some party. Bass pounding, vision hazy with too-sweet cider, groping for meaning in the sweaty palms of other people. Dying to really know someone as beads of condensation drip down their flat, watery pints. Depriving myself of sleep because I thought intimacy was asking deep questions and eating chorizo at 3am with a man who will never love you. Forty days and forty nights straight of too-strong coffee and heart-throbbing anxiety. Trying on different selves for every single person you meet.
Will they like me if I sound posher? Will they like me if I’m thinner? Will they like me if I’m a Tory? A socialist? Will they like me if I point out I use long words? Will they like me if I flirt with them? If I make the same jokes as them? Will they like me if I admit that I am the very scum they want to eradicate? Will they like me if I cut my heart out and serve it to them on a silver platter? If I promise to be good? If I promise to be bad? Will they like me if I grind myself into a thousand tiny pieces and make a smooth paste from myself that they can clean their teeth with? Will they like me if I hold my breath every single day of my life?
I’m fourteen and I’m trying to make sense of the world through my livejournal account, ifallbackwards. I’m fourteen and I stay up too late on MSN trying to get my friends to love me. I am seventeen and making YouTube videos and trying to make someone listen to me. Nineteen and burying myself in Ginsberg in the library at 4am. Twenty-one and in a new city, spilling steins of beer on myself and vomiting blue when I get home. Twenty-five and making zines about how lost I feel. Home is a found thing, they say. The problem with that is until you find it, deep in the pores of your skin, there’s nowhere for you to rest.
I didn’t find revelation in the port-drunk eyes of a person I barely knew. Never found revolution between flickering lights and sticky carpets. I found revelation trying to run away from myself on every single one of this country’s coasts. Found it lurking in the creeping hangover the day after I made a fool of myself. Found it on New Year’s Day in Bamburgh, barraged by salt and fog. Found revolution on picket lines, communal meals, the love of friends who always have a sofa for you.
One of my last public YouTube videos is a poem entitled “Fragments” (October 28, 2016). I do not talk about the summer I have had, confronting lies I am telling myself about myself. I do not talk about falling in love with a boy that looked intently into the mud-filled grooves of my soul. I do not describe the ways I am busy folding myself into origami, keeping myself small and ornamental. Instead, I confess the only way I know how, lying to a camera:
“I’ve spent some time trying to compile pieces of words, tattered papers lost in the dust of the past. There is a part of me that hopes to stick it together, make an intentional mosaic, like I didn’t rip it up and am vainly hoping for some semblance of normality again.”