Toma este puñal.
As I sit down and open this to type down, I just got hit with the realization that I only end up using this space every time I have a problem with Instagram, I hope I can correct this in the future and maybe give a bit more relevance to this space as opposed to Instagram. I also notice how I keep saying that I will de-prioritize Instagram, yet it keeps being a priority.
Today I posted a self-portrait facing the ground while a single Nike Air Jordans 1 hovers menacingly over the top of my head, that in itself doesn’t sound like anything too controversial, however I decided to include a paragraph of an Alci Acosta song called “Amor Gitano” (Gypsy Love) and the paragraph which is a very raw display of Latin American tragic romanticism reads “Toma este puñal, ábreme las venas, quiero desangrarme hasta que me muera” which translates to something akin to “Take this knife, open my veins, I want to bleed until I die”. However tragic this line sounds, I decided to make this the title of my drawing for many reasons, the main reason being the fact that this simple paragraph holds a very graphic and powerful emotion that effectively pierces your heart, hearing the stoic voice of Acosta as he goes through this line in his song will make anyone feel something, for me personally it will absolutely make me cry especially if I sing it (I love singing).
And so as my post was doing actually pretty good for a change on Insta which lately is an anomaly, I was suddenly hit with a pop-up that told me that someone reported my post because they thought I was about to be suicidal, this action immediately deletes the post and places your account in a semi-lockdown mode in which you cannot do lives for a given time and also ranks down your content and all of the punishment that comes with getting a post stroke down by Instagram.
It made me feel very sad when this happened because I honestly put a lot of effort and heart into that particular drawing, I poured a lot of myself in it to the point where I feel a bit spiritually depleted after it, and so to see it be deleted when it was actually gaining traction and doing alright felt like a gut punch. But the thing that really made me upset was the fact that someone did this, and at face value honestly it is a good call to do something when you see or sense that something is wrong, but goddamn was that the best course of action? flag a post? I really hope whoever did it was some rando and not someone who actually follows me and cares for me because it would be really sad.
Don’t get me wrong, if you feel that someone you care about is in a crisis or in a really bad spot, absolutely do reach out, try to talk to them, be a friend, check in and offer a little bit of your time and company, that will absolutely save a life, reporting a post to Instagram without even checking in with the person who posted it will absolutely not save a life, do you think Meta is going to do something about it? do you think Meta cares? they only care about their app being a hygienic paradise of right words, right thoughts and right actions, they will not try to save my life, all they would do is maybe offer a link, and place blocks in my account so worse case scenario I don’t use their tool to broadcast whatever ends up happening.
Is it maybe because we don’t want to feel discomfort anymore? we don’t want to face things that make us feel uneasy? the idea of that makes me very sad, I feel that it’s antithetic to what I believe about life and what I believe about art and beauty, I firmly believe that the reason we are able to appreciate the wonderful things about being alive, is because we have seen the opposite, we have felt pain, we have been sad, we have been hurt over and over again, but do we stop talking about sadness, about pain, about being hurt? no, we talk about it, we socialize it with friends and family, sometimes we transform that pain into something beautiful, a book, a poem, a painting, a song, a non-profit to combat it, that is the beauty that is born from the pain and the discomfort of existence, we are who we are because we recognize that in life there is pain, and we manage that pain and we overcome it and learn from it, and we transcend.
As I discussed this situation with a painter that I admire (sometimes it feels so crazy that I can speak one on one with people that I admire as idols in my field) we discussed how these raw lyrics and writings in music, poetry and literature, as well as these tough difficult images from movies and paintings that communicate a lot of pain, were so important in our young lives, because far from becoming a catalyst to imitate it, it would actually made us feel like we were not alone, it made us feel that there were people who felt the same things that we felt, that it was valid to feel those feelings, it gave us hope. I know this because I struggled with suicidal thoughts when I was younger, and the sad songs that I listened eased my pain and allowed me to explore my feelings and cry them away from my soul. However when darkness set in, and nothing would make it go away, it was the feeling of being absolutely alone in this world, and the confirmation that I had no one to talk to about it, which would lead me to do things that I’m glad I didn’t do with enough determination to make sure it was done to completion.
In the end, as I explained in the edited Instagram post, what I wanted to channel was my younger and tragically romantic self, that young kid that was always yearning to be loved, would get his heart constantly broken, I wanted to explore the drama of being a young kid in love, thinking that being loved by someone was the only thing worth achieving, South American Romeo plagued by impossible love, I think that topic is sprinkled throughout my art, even more so after admitting to myself that I am a contemporary romantic, I want to honor that kid in my art because that kid planted the seeds that I’m sowing today through my artwork, I am back from Colombia in a trip that felt like a trip to my past and how could I not pay homage to my most tragicomically romantic version? but no good deed goes unpunished and this wasn’t the exception.
If you or anyone you know is in a critical situation, make sure you make an effort to reach out or seek actual help, instead of flagging a post that made you uncomfortable while doing absolutely nothing to help.
