Thoughts from San Francisco: Taking Up Space

Amogh Manjunath

I am here in a professional capacity, finally meeting some team members. San Francisco is a beautiful, breezy, bright city. I truly did not expect to like it, let alone love it, this much.

Now onto some thoughts I had while there, of course completely unrelated to my experience of SF:

Having too many people’s thoughts in your head is terrible, especially as a creator. You end up holding yourself up to the standards that a random person spews on their page.

This happens a lot on Twitter, now called “X”, due to the opinionated nature of the platform. Due to how easy it is for negative tweets to go viral, it can quickly make you police yourself. Be guarded. Measured.

I didn’t realize how much of this I do until I analyzed my content, something I do when I’m having an existential crisis about life or my creative output. It’s easy to blame Elon Musk. But this is a phenomenon you can find on any platform, it happens on TikTok as well.

I haven’t found an antidote, it all goes back to taking up space, being seen, heard, and accepting of self.

Being a creator has been challenging in ways I never imagined. It’s like a therapy session. Suddenly it’s clear to see how your mind has been conditioned to be one way and not another.

If you have been led to believe, since childhood I’m presuming, that your thoughts don’t matter - this will have an impact on you in multitudes of ways. It’s exhausting.

As with Twitter, muting and blocking help. But it’s mostly people that I follow or interact with. Time for a cleanse.