Presence As Survival

Being here in a time that pushes us toward performance and harm.

Photo by Mai Nguyen.

I have been thinking a lot about presence as this year folds into its final weeks. Not the presence that appears in self-help books, morning mantras, or in filtered Instagram captions that often offer comfort without weight. I mean the older kind of presence. The kind that asks a person to sit fully inside their own life. The kind that asks for vulnerability, patience, and the courage to feel something without immediately turning it into something consumable. A presence that stands like a witness and says I am here, even when the world keeps insisting that we perform instead of live.

I keep returning to a simple question. What does it mean to be present in a time when everything pushes us toward performance and harm. Because we are not only performing for attention anymore. We are performing for survival. We are performing for safety in a country where people are being deported without warning. We are performing for stability in a world where the cost of groceries and rent feels like a punishment for existing. We are performing for a sense of belonging in a time when genocide streams across our screens in real time and people debate the value of human life as if it were a theory.

In a world like this, presence becomes political survival. Presence becomes a refusal. Presence becomes a way to say I will not disappear inside your systems or your screens or your expectations.

Living inside so much crisis can make a person forget that the first place presence disappears is within ourselves. Before the world erodes our communities it erodes our attention and our inner steadiness.

Some of these thoughts began after a few long talks with one of my closest friends, my brother Joél Leon. A few weeks ago he stepped away from using social media for anything other than promotional and sharing needs. He did not leave because he was angry. He did not leave because of the community he had found on the platforms. He left because he wanted his life to belong to him again. He wanted to feel his days without the constant pressure to perform them. He wanted vinyls, movies, and books that he tells his closest friends about—as opposed to the tens of thousands of people who follow him.

I witnessed a similar decision years ago from another dear brother, Robert Jones, Jr. I watched him reclaim parts of himself that the world kept tugging at. He went even further than most by deleting his social media accounts entirely, a choice that felt less like disappearance and more like a return to himself.

Watching Joel, Robert, and others choose that path has made me look at myself. I have had to admit how much of my own interior world I have handed over to the endless machine of production.

When you make a living as a writer today, performance becomes part of the job whether you agree to it or not. A book is not simply a book. It becomes a project with links, rollouts, announcements, campaigns, algorithms, and a series of quiet hopes that people will pre-order or share. Even a Substack post becomes something more than a piece of writing. It becomes a call for support and a reminder that this work only continues if people see value in it. And when paid subscribers fall, it does not feel like a business shift. It feels like a verdict about whether your work matters (I see this as I currently hemorrhage paid subscribers, ha).

Performance follows you everywhere. You walk into a room that is supposed to hold art or curiosity or joy and the conversation shifts toward follower counts, bestseller lists, awards, and which agency represents you. People talk about belonging as if it can be measured through metrics. As if the proof of a writer is in the numbers rather than the soul of the work.

But this pressure does not belong only to writers and artists. It belongs to all of us now. We live in a culture that rewards constant visibility. We live in a time when silence is treated like apathy and stillness is treated like laziness. Privacy becomes suspicion. Thoughtfulness becomes delay. Even grief must be packaged. Even joy must be explained.

No wonder we feel tired. No wonder so many people have forgotten how to simply be. Because if we cannot sit with ourselves, we cannot sit with each other either. We lose the ability to listen. We lose the ability to imagine alternatives. We lose the ability to build movements that require time and intimacy. And meanwhile the world burns on. Fascism rises in quiet corridors. Children are bombed while politicians debate semantics. Climate disasters suddenly hit towns that have never seen floods. ICE kicks in doors in the middle of the night. People work two and three jobs and still cannot afford a day of rest. Violence becomes background noise.

Presence in a world like this is not a spiritual exercise. It is a political act. It is a refusal to let crisis steal our inner lives.

The speed of our world is its own kind of violence. We are asked to react before we understand. To post before we process. To respond before we feel. We are encouraged to perform urgency instead of practicing care. And this erodes the very things that keep us human. It erodes attention. It erodes the slow unfolding of a life. It erodes the ground that art grows from.

Watching Joel, Robert, and others step away from social media is a reminder that refusing this violence is still possible. Their choice is a form of reclamation. A way of taking back their sense of self from the constant demand to be visible. It made me ask what I want my life to feel like, not what I want it to look like. And that question is changing everything. Because the real danger of performance is not that we confuse others. It is that we lose our ability to tell the truth to ourselves.

I was thinking about what the last day was that felt fully mine. It was a quiet evening sitting on my couch with a copy of The Essential June Jordan in my hands, “Magnolia” by J.J. Cale playing in the background, and the city spread out beneath my windows like a moving mural. The only thing moving in the room was my dog, Stokely. I was turning the pages and letting the sentences rise in me without rushing to share, annotate, or meet a deadline to blurb. I was simply reading a book while the world moved outside my window. It was small, almost embarrassingly simple, yet it was one of the few moments I can recently remember myself as a person rather than a producer or some sort of vessel.

It is obvious I am still learning what presence really is. I would not pretend otherwise. But I know for certain it does not come dressed in glamour. Presence does not ask to be admired. It asks to be lived. It cannot be saved, shared, filtered, or branded. It is necessary for love, trust, imagination, community, and healing. Presence holds contradictions without rushing to resolve them. Presence creates the conditions where justice can begin. Presence allows people to gather in real rooms and plan real change.

Yet so many of us cannot remember the last time we lived something without the instinct to narrate it. We try to archive our lives while forgetting to live them. The result is a spiritual thinning that takes something vital away from us.

A people who cannot be present cannot resist effectively. A people who cannot slow down cannot imagine anything better than what they have. A people who perform more than they connect cannot build the kind of solidarity required to survive these times.

Which brings me back to writing. I believe writing is the act of sitting still long enough to hear the small truth behind the larger truth. Writing asks for patience, discomfort, and quiet. But the way we work now forces many writers to create faster than they can feel or grow. It is not only a creative challenge. It is a spiritual loss.

So I want to return to presence. Not as an escape, but as survival. I want my life to unfold in rooms where people speak without worrying about how they sound in the minds of strangers. I want conversations that wander. I want laughter that arrives without a camera ready to catch it.

And this is not to say that I will delete my social media, because the truth is that I cannot afford to do that as an author who is still carving out space in the publishing world of this moment. But two things can be true at once. I can choose to emphasize the offline parts of my life while still using the online world as a vessel for connection rather than an altar for worship, which is what it has quietly become for so many people.

I want my readers to feel that presence. I want them to feel a kind of permission. Permission to breathe. Permission to slow down. Permission to be fully human in a world that tries to turn people into content and statistic. If the world insists on reducing us, let the page be where we expand.

A sentence without presence is only ink. A sentence with presence is a living thing. And I want to offer that living thing to anyone who finds their way to my work. Because yes, I want people to act on the truths I write, but I also want to remind us that we are allowed to move at a human pace. We are allowed to take our time.

If my pages of poetry, essays, and novels can hold that, then maybe they can hold us. If the writing can be present, then maybe we can remember presence again. And if we can remember presence again, maybe we can survive this moment without losing ourselves.

I believe that is how we keep saying I am here in a world that keeps trying to make us disappear.

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