I Cannot Say

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

If I revealed the last thing I searched for online, it would be the name of the person I was stalking.

The why is obvious—I wanted to know if this person posted anything on their social media accounts that would give me a bit of insight into something I was curious about.

Why do we stalk people from the shadows?

I will be the first to confess that it gives me a thrill. As open as I can be on my blog, I can be just as closed off in real life—but the downside of that is that it’s hard to let people in and it can get really lonely sometimes. My experience these past several years with letting people in has, without fail, ended in disaster. I don’t know if it’s the generation that we currently live in that makes people fickle, or if it’s due to my sheltered upbringing, or my expectations are way off—or a combination of any of these options—but the end result has always been incredibly disappointing.

I read somewhere recently that everyone being online gives people the illusion of options so no one wants to be loyal and committed anymore. It really resonated with me and makes so much sense. The emotional nakedness that comes with face-to-face interactions, especially in todays hookup culture, is harder for most people than being physically naked with a stranger they just met.

Third base now means posting someone on your Instagram story!

First base is sex.

Crazy. Completely and utterly bonkers. I genuinely don’t like this bandwagon we’re all on and I want to get off.

But back to my stalking. As much as I hate it, I also secretly enjoy the thrill. But along with this, I am totally aware of how toxic it is and I’m looking forward to the day that I will no longer have the urge to stalk anyone because of how in love with my own life I will be.

And I’m taking that one to the bank.

Author: ebonyandcrows

Hello and welcome to my page~ My name is Larisa--a very common Slavic name that was either derived from the Latin word hilaris, meaning "cheerful," or from the Greek city of Larissa, meaning "strong fortress." Born in Ukraine, I emigrated with my family to America when I was still a small child and now make my home in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Growing up immersed in two vastly differing cultures led me to have a burning curiosity about people all over the world. Stemming from said curiosity, I have fallen in love with traveling to other countries, meeting new people and delving into their culture, exploring new cities, and of course, dining on the local cuisine! If I cannot escape into a different country, then my next favorite method of adventure is to lose myself in a spectacular book. I enjoy books of all genres--from fiction and novels, to biographies and ethnographies. As long as it captures my fancy and holds me spellbound the entire time, I will burn through the book like a forest fire! Because of this penchant for reading and travel, coupled with my love of deep and mysterious things, I have been often called a dreamer and I find the title suits me. With that being said, I invite you to stay a while, perhaps make yourself a cup of tea and linger through my posts and feel free to comment or share a thought :-)

35 thoughts on “I Cannot Say”

    1. Thank you! I often let these thoughts drift out of my mind and onto the proverbial pen and paper when I’m laying in bed at night and can’t quite fall asleep.

      In the end, we’re all so very human, aren’t we?

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  2. I admire your honestly and ability to identify the flaw in what you are doing. I truly hope that you get to witness the beauty of a meaningful relationship and fill that void deep inside. God bless you.

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  4. “I read somewhere recently that everyone being online gives people the illusion of options so no one wants to be loyal and committed anymore. ”

    I compare the online experience to packed passenger trains. There are lots of people onboard, but all in isolation. I don’t have IG, or FB, so I’m not searching for anyone. As a matter of fact, the main reason I don’t have FB is because I don’t want past life people crashing in on current life experiences. I firmly believe that people who are no longer in my personal orbit are no longer there for a reason.

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    1. I used to not have Instagram for many years. I also haven’t had Facebook since my teen years, that’s for our parents generation.

      But I created an Instagram to follow someone I had a toxic relationship with a few years ago and I haven’t deleted it yet. I am so picky with who I follow and who I let follow me though because I honestly despise letting people ‘in real life’ have that much access to me and my life.

      I feel completely different about my blog. But I’ve only told a select few people about my blog—the rest of my friends on here are other bloggers who I’ve never met in real life.

      I lamented to my sister recently that social media has taken away any and all mystery from the world. Bring back the days where you stepped outside and everything immediately felt like an unknown adventure to be explored. (But keep the GPS—just take away the ability to see what people had for breakfast the next country over. Or, *shudder* “get ready with me” videos from influencers 🤢.) The immediate access and and validation people get from online likes and follows also breeds it’s own manner of narcissism. Okay let me stop because I’ll start venting/rambling.

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      1. Keep it going! lol INFLUENCERS! uggh. Yeah, influencers influence me to do the opposite. God, I don’t know what would happen to the majority of people in this world if they should lose electricity.

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        1. I actually know someone who legit panics when if she can’t access her Instagram. One time she was locked out of her account and she had so much anxiety and when she got it back, she posted that she felt like she disappeared without it 😕

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  5. I have to admit I laughed my head off at your opening sentence, “If I revealed the last thing I searched for online, it would be the name of the person I was stalking.”

    Still I suppose online stalking is preferable to real life stalking since it saves you the embarrassment of getting arrested by police on the front lawn of the house belonging to the person you were stalking in real life (I discovered I don’t look so good in mug shots of me wearing an orange jump suit with a long number in front of me).

    But I do know what you mean about letting people in.

    It’s a very hard thing to do.

    It’s like the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s song Clouds ☁️, “I’ve looked at clouds 🌧️ from both sides now and still somehow it’s clouds’ illusions I recall, … don’t give yourself away”.

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    1. Hahaha I laughed that you laughed! 😅 I’m glad that it was my turn to make you laugh—usually it’s me when reading your vampire chapters.

      Oh no, I am much too secretive to stalk anyone in real life. Even the thought of it makes my skin try to crawl right off my frame. But online though…we’ll that’s fair game 🤷‍♀️

      Those are great lyrics—looking at clouds from both sides and yet they still remain illusions in our mind. Such a perfect metaphor for so many things we encounter while on this black earth.

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      1. It is indeed a perfect metaphor for so many things we encounter on this black earth.

        I remember many years ago when I used to make photo montage music videos, I made one showing scenes from the British TV series Merlin and used Joni Mitchell’s song Clouds as the background song for the video, the lyrics seemed to fit perfectly the photos I chose to use in that video.

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  7. I resonate well with your views of social media. I grew up without phones or internet. Every communication was face to face and I was naive and innocent in my thoughts and believed everyone else was too. Those were happy years. Now the internet brings us the truth of who we really are as a collective of spirits haunting the airwaves. We believe that we can have any type of face we want and we change faces minute by minute. What most people don’t realize is they have become the pseudo-soul they were pretending to be. You are sensitive enough to see this and it’s not pleasant. Knowing allows you to stay safe as long as you don’t fall into the trap of letting the internet rule your life and tell you what you must be to join the pseudo-world. Let your inner beauty reflect who you are and your physical beauty will be your mirror to the world. Thus spake Hyperion 😉

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    1. “Thus spake Hyperion” I love it! Your last line made me laugh hahaha

      I love your comment, I read it several times. It resonates with so much TRUTH. I was a child in the 90’s, and even as a child, I recognize how different the world used to be. Children generally have a rosy view of the world, but it genuinely just felt different. People just went about their lives. Everything was…normal. Now everyone wants to be an influencer and you see them shamelessly filming themselves with a tripod on a busy street, doing some trendy tik tok dance with complete and utter disregard for how people perceive them. The narcissism is off the charts. Subsequently, so is depression. And I believe it was Karl Lagerfeld who coined the phrase, “trendy is one step away from tacky” and I couldn’t agree more.

      To be fair, I don’t want to come off as a hypocrite because I do have an Instagram account and some of my posts on there have garnered many likes before I got sick of it and went private. I enjoy filming where I’m at when I’m traveling and sharing it with the world at large. But I recognize the double edged sword it can be—the crestfallenness when a post you hoped would go viral doesn’t. Social media today presents a problem that our parents of yesteryear didn’t have to deal with.

      “What most people don’t realize is the have become the pseudo-soul they were pretending to be.” THIS! I’ve talked about this before in that we should always remember that what we are seeing online are only highlight reels of a persons life (and many times it’s a manufactured one at that) , and we tend to compare our lowest moments to people’s highlight reels and think our life amounts to nothing because others have it so much better. Obviously I’m generalizing but for the most part, being online is like this.

      Ah, I could go on and on.

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      1. You are a wise person, Larisa. I think this falls into the, “do all things with moderation.” Some social media can connect you with friends, family and like minded people but it can also enslave you as you eloquently expressed. It’s amazing at how powerful the attraction is to social media but at the same time it shows how we desire connection, which we must feel we don’t have without the sparkling glitter world of social media. You are on to it and you see it for what it really is.

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  8. My first thought was that’s so creepy, my second was to admit I’ve done that lol. But don’t give up on people. It is hard to have relationships. I grew up in a close loving home and that didn’t prepare me for how deceptive people can be. I made ignorant choices figuring people are mostly honest and it turns out they aren’t and that’s sad. But I’d rather be hurt than to not truly get to live. As someone on their third marriage, I’m clearly not a love guru, but I at least learned from my mistakes. Always make sure you’re heading in the same direction, just because you get along doesn’t mean you want the same things in life. And always be honest about yourself. You won’t be happy if you feel the need to change yourself to make someone else happy, and you need to accept others won’t change so if you don’t like how they are now you’re not going to like how they are in the future.

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    1. This was a good comment. The kind I enjoy reading.

      You’re not the only one who has thought that people are mostly good or mostly honest or mostly ___(insert some other positive quality). I’ve always scoffed at those kind of statements; they always sounded so naive to me. Knowing my own self, I will flat out tell you that people, despite their intentions, mostly always make disasters of everything. We can’t even say people are mostly good because we are all so much more complex than that. I would say it’s probably more accurate to say that people mostly mean well. But that doesn’t always translate into the real world correctly.

      Your line about choosing to experience hurt if that means you get to experience the full measure of life resonates with that little rhyme about love:

      “Id rather to have loved and lost,
      And had my heart thrown out and tossed
      Against a solid granite wall
      Than never to have loved at all.”

      I’ve known many people who’ve made hasty or ignorant choices in life that later realized how monumental the consequences of said choice were.

      The tips about marriage and choosing the correct attributes in a spouse are spot on. I can sense that advice is coming from someone who learned that the hard way.

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  9. I think for folks of my generation who grew up before the Internet, social media, smart phones and email (yep, I am that old!) we can walk between the two worlds – not always easily or comfortably or successfully, but we manage it nonetheless. I think, however, for people who have come to maturity in the last twenty years, their total immersion in technology has radically transformed their understanding of body, intimacy, connection, relationship, self and society. That’s not meant to be a comparison to the effect that the context in which I grew up was “good” while the context of modernity is “bad” – because there was plenty about my formative context that was “bad”. It’s just an observation about how powerfully different the formative context of modernity is to hat of all previous generations, which in turn influences the matters you touch on in this post.

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    1. Perfectly encapsulated. I was a child in the 90’s and I also remember the advent of the internet and how enthralled we were by chat rooms and aol, and then the parade of social media platforms that debuted. (MySpace, anyone?)

      However, being a child in the 90’s and seeing my oldest sister be properly courted by young men who would come for tea and go out of their way to woo her is a far cry from the dating apps of today, where people choose their partners by swiping left or right. I feel like I straddle this dichotomy and I can’t quite find where I fit.

      You’re right in that nothing is inherently good or bad, but I would much rather prefer to bring back the era and innocence of the 90’s. I use the word ‘innocence’ loosely because each era had its manner of vice, but back then we didn’t have so much debauchery. But then again, I am viewing my childhood through rose-colored glasses and I long for those halcyon days.

      There is much that technology has done to improve our lives, but it’s a double edged sword—one whose line I find myself constantly balancing on.

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      1. You are right: there are no absolute “good” or “bad” when it comes to technology. If anything, it is deeply ambivalent, and poses the challenge of having to navigate and negotiate its open-endedness toward life-affirming outcomes. Which can be extraordinarily hard.

        But even when I think about the dating websites (what’s an app?) of my long ago 20s and 30s, they were very different spaces (or at least, they seem to me now) than the online “relationship” websites and apps of the present – which strike me as viscerally predatory and sexualised. Of course, people lied online “back in the day” and it had its share of creeps and stalkers…but there was a quality to it which I think is summed up by your use of the word “innocence”.

        That said, I suspect the online reality of modernity presents as “natural” and “normal” to younger adults today, and the qualities and issues we identify as problematic they regard as de rigueur. Indeed, I suspect the “convenience” factor is also at the fore, inasmuch as the dating you and I remember is messy, complex, frequently embarrassing and requires a certain amount of hutzpah (which I, as an introvert, always struggled with). By comparison, “swipe left” or “swipe right” is a doddle!

        But maybe that sense of depersonalisation you speak of will in time spark a counter-movement, if not necessarily toward “dating” as we remember it, but at least toward online platforms and processes that at least humanise the experience. because, afterall, even with everything online, people still have to meet face-to-face in the end…

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            1. Yeah blogging allows me to retain some anonymity and even autonomy with how close I let people in, oddly enough. Instagram feels like people are breathing right down my neck for some reason, so I have a hard time with it sometimes. I’ll go on deletion sprees and start deleting people and unfollowing them when I start feeling claustrophobic.

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