In the last year I’ve found myself running more and more. Since July, I’ve logged anywhere between four to sixteen miles each time I run. This newfound passion was mainly fueled when I downloaded Strava, a social media fitness app that tracks my milage and documents every place that I run. This is then packaged and published online, where you can see your friends’ workouts as well.

It makes sense why I would be hooked onto running by way of Strava. There’s a huge part of me that’s magnetized onto numbers, data and empirical progress. I, of course, grew up in the social media age, and my existence of creativity has always lived in contingence with the act of publishing these pieces online, where numbers are always attached.

*Wilmington Half Marathon. Nov. 5, 2023. I was drenched.*

When I was fourteen years old, I started writing poetry. From the beginning, I would post these writings on Instagram for the world (and secretly, my then-love interests) to see. This was the first time I witnessed the numbers of the internet working in my favor. I can distinctly remember the emotions I felt when I was at my peak follower count in 2015, on a high school band trip to New York City. On the charter bus, heading up the East Coast while the Baltimore skyline slowly passed by, I wrote up a poem, scribbled it in sharpie on a Moleskine, and snapped a picture of it out the bus window. The photo today has over 2000 likes on it.

These days, I think of my short stint as an infleuncer-poet fondly. I am, in fact, a beneficiary of that former identity today. When I was fifteen and dreaming in my rural hometown in North Carolina, I imagined my life in 10 years as a writer and poet in New York. As a result, ~ten years later, I find myself as a creative freelancer in– who would have guessed it– New York City. Yet, I’m not wyltbam_ anymore. The death of his identity is intentional. The reality of my years as a literary-yearner-and-online-self-documenter as an Instagram poet is that I was making three posts a day, each with original writings, from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. I had self-published two books by the end of it, each with its own plethora of typos. And I was my own social media manager, interacting with my audience and collaborating with other fellow Instagram poets.

*“Traveler” by @wyltbam_. April 6, 2015.*

By the end of wyltbam_, I was accepted into undergrad for a visual journalism degree– and I found an excuse to have a departure to my days as an Instagram poet. I could pause the bleeding of every day vulnerability I felt inclined to continue (or else how could I continue to scale my engagement metrics?). I could disappear and hide behind the curtain of journalistic ethics, where I could just be an institutionalized fly-on-the-wall. And finally, outside of class, I could just be myself, whoever that might be, since I had been spending all my time being an half-mysterious, half online persona.

It’s been six years since I closed up shop on wyltbam_. The account is still live on Instagram as its own public archive, with 8,000 less followers than what it was at its peak. I logged out years ago; the password has now been buried under my own memories, which I like to believe is also by intention. There’s more than one reason why I don’t keep the account going anymore, but one of the biggest ones is that, by the end, I wasn’t sure if I liked poetry more than I liked the numbers game that came with running a poetry account. At some point, what came first was feeding a fire that I had created, and I had fed it everything I had and more.

I’ve got a tendency to throw everything into the fire just to see what survives, myself included.

That’s also the tendency of freelance work, I’ve found, in the last year plus. As a freelancer, I’ve mainly worked in social video as an editor, writer and producer.

In empirical senses, in the last year plus, I’ve:

Edited over 400 vertical videos.
Edited over 100 hour+ long podcasts.
Produced and edited non-profit social media rollouts, videos and carousels included.

Yet, beyond my rent-paying endeavors, and without ever really publicly sharing what I’ve been working on in a formal way, I’ve also:

Co-Created a 3-person creative documentary collective, From Kudzu, surrounding the Asian American Experience in the U.S. South. We’ve filmed the first leg of our grant-backed documentary and are constantly looking for more fundraising support.
Co-created a NYC-Based experimental experiences collective empowering BIPOC Queer creatives, Chonk Parties.
Begun post production for a personal documentary I’ve been writing and filming since 2019.
Developed my own analog film scanning workflow, which finds itself into all of my personal work.

*On the From Kudzu roadtrip in the Summer of 2023. Self-scanned.*

A good friend of mine once told me that I look like a different person in every photo that I take.

A mentor of mine once told me once that in order to be considered for a job, I had to present myself as more specialized. More specific.

I think there’s some considerable truth to both of these statements. Intrinsically, poet me is not remotely relatable to 400-videos-edited-in-a-year me. And yet, I exist in the nuances of both identities, and I’ve still found a way to pay rent. The downside to freelance this year, though, came with burnout. Just like when I was 16 and running a poetry account, except now, I have bills to pay.

By the time I’m writing this entry 1.0, it’s January 31. My contracts have all concluded; I’m looking for work for the second time in my freelancing career. I’m learning how to remain calm in this perpetual search for income. I’m also learning how to rest in a period of quietness. I’m deciphering the whispers of doubt and the perceived instability that comes in the lulls of the year– yet, the itch, to share is always omnipresent.

The name of this blog is a combo name, a standard Filipino naming convention (for which even my name, Nash, is a suit of, as my full first name is Nathaniel Josh). The name combines two words: infinity and inevitable. It’s also a recycled name from a side project I used to have when I was posting on my poetry account. In the latter stages of writing poetry on instagram, I found myself writing more and more prose. As a result of this, in secret, I made infinevitable as an outlet to my responsibilities as wyltbam_. For a moment I had fallen in love with writing, perhaps for the first time ever; it wasn’t subject to commodification, it wasn’t in constant public criticism, and it was a conversation I could have nearly exclusively with myself. In many ways, it was a return to myself– an acknowledging of every identity and interest I’ve ever had. The account itself was recycled again and again, as I found more uses for it as this outlet vehicle when I found myself burnt out of visual journalism.

This is my desire for this blog, as I become increasingly more cognizant of the associated dread that comes with adding to the group projects of Instagram and LinkedIn, the two outlets which I owe and hold ambivalence to both my personal professional successes (and failures). I hope to myself– in my chronic-onlineness– that this can serve as a buffer to my former fires of consumption and production burnout that I’ve historically found myself in.

I hope to you, who reads this, that you can enter this home I’ve made, reclaimed and recycled. I hope that you can observe the multitude of vignettes that compile into my thought processes which surround me constantly.

*Welcome to my home. Wilmington, NC. November 2023. Self-scanned.*

Nash Consing is open for freelance work in social media, video editing and video producing in both documentary and digital formats.

Contact at: nashconsing@gmail.com

Infinites and Inevitables,