“This Infinity Mirror of Free Expression”: Gabi Abrão on Ambient Love and the Metaphysics of Social Media

“I always feel like this mad scientist alone in my house thinking, ‘Okay, how do I put this into words?’” says Gabi Abrão, the LA-born artist-influencer otherwise known as @sighswoon. Her work is animated by an ecstatic desire to find a language for her lived experience and translate it into other creative mediums. An internet alchemist, Gabi has a particular way of infusing her philosophical musings with a grounded quality not commonly found on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. You may have been greeted by one of her viral “digital resting points” in your recent scrolling sessions, for instance. To come across her content is to momentarily float in an otherwise choppy digital sea. For Gabi, social media is just somewhere she can jot things down, realize ideas, manifest inspiration – she sees it as “a notepad for creatives.” She just riffs. While the internet is where Gabi originally cultivated her artistic identity (initially through very wholesome memes), she’s entering a new creative phase with the forthcoming publication of her first tangible, paper-and-ink book, aptly titled Notes on Shapeshifting.

It’s important to know that Gabi is radiant, endowed with the kind of effortless grace associated with fresh linens and blooming orchids. She seems to inhabit a perpetual golden hour and speaks with a certain clarity that somehow also refines the edges of your own thoughts – a contagious lucidity. “We’re actually quite simple and everything to be said has already been said,” she shares. “The experience of humans on Earth is really just this infinity mirror of free expression.” Combine this philosophical heft with what she calls her “Virgo aesthetic” and I suspect that this is part of what has earned her such a devoted community – they just want to linger in the quiet charisma of her calm.

It’s less that she has an “audience” of 141,000 Instagram followers and more that she has 141,000 witnesses: Gabi just peels back the curtains and lets people in on her creative process and emotional journey. Somehow you can tell that everything she writes, everything she posts, is all done for herself, for her own amusement, first and foremost. And people gravitate towards that energy. “Now you have an archive of what are pretty much a bunch of journal entries and notes from creators. How great is that?” she asks, referring to social media. “I would love to have seen that for certain artists I love who didn’t have the Internet just to watch them evolve.” One such source of creative inspiration and influence is Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (whom Gabi quotes in her book): “I feel like she gave me permission to be myself in a way,” she muses. “Any artist or musician or anyone that I end up getting attached to, it’s because I feel like they give me permission for something.” The infinity mirror of expression continues its loop: that same sense of radical permission overflows from Gabi’s own work.

Our conversation about social media and love in its many forms (romantic love, self-love, universal love) casually evolves into a discourse on metaphysics, except better because it has no jargon. When commenting on the notion of love itself, Gabi stays on brand and immediately links it to illusion (she co-hosts a podcast called Illusion Pod): “So much of life is sweeping away illusions to let you see what’s really there,” she says. “And love is there all the time, but I think it exists in various magnifications depending on what we believe or what we’ve been told to believe.” So much of what we’ve been told to believe is that the most valuable form of love is romantic, and that it must be linear and eternal or otherwise reduced to failure. But Gabi follows Heraclitus in recognizing that change and death are the only certainties on this terrestrial plane. While love is also subject to change and endings, this doesn’t extinguish or invalidate it. Ultimately, it’s still everywhere: “Great feelings like love feel familiar,” she shares. “When I feel a wave of love, I’m like, ‘Oh, there it is again,’ like, ‘Oh, it’s visiting.’ When I experience that, I feel that love really is the baseline and all of this other stuff that takes our attention and that we manipulate and put ourselves through, that’s the chaos – that’s the illusion. Because, otherwise, how come love just feels so familiar?”

When I ask whether love can ever be free of illusions, she ventures, “I don’t think there’s any escape from illusions. But I think just knowing that they’re there can be nice. It takes the pressure off.” In a world of illusions, we can abandon our gestures towards perfection – all those painful and fated efforts to accurately convey ourselves to the world. We can stop taking our performances so seriously and understand them as universal. “Everyone always hates on creators or influencers or actors or, you know, people who put themselves out there,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘No, we’re all performing.’ Those people just happen to be comfortable doing it out in the open. But it’s everyone – we all perform. That’s how we survive. And I think it’s great. It’s a great time.” To rest easy in the fact that we live lives mediated by layers of illusions is to liberate oneself from the gravity of self-disclosure. It is to recognize ourselves as works in progress. “Social media can make us aware of our inevitable performance as a little beings on Earth, and we can kind of giggle with and get to know ourselves,” Gabi explains. “But it can also be viewed as an isolated me-against-an-audience or me-with-an-audience experience. It can go both ways. But veering into the more performance-aware side, I think it can really aid in self-love and give you a sense of humor about yourself and being a being on Earth.”

While her vision is inflected by a certain existential humility, instead of shying away from the necessary self-interest that accompanies creation and performance, Gabi leans into it: “Self-interest, to me, is not a bad word. I’m interested in what I can extract from all my experiences and all the sensations I’m feeling.” It’s this will to self-knowledge, this drive to refine and better convey her experience, that motivates her artistic practice. The negative connotation of self-interest largely derives from the assumption that people, particularly women, must be drastically available and other-oriented in their loving relationships. Gabi reveals that she “became a way better person and a way better partner” once she realized her need for solitude and began embracing her identity as a self-interested creator. “Creators really need to make peace with their self-interest, even with their narcissism, because that’s part of the deal,” she explains. “You’re sitting there, you’re making stuff, you’re alone with yourself. There’s so much self-involvement. Make peace with it so you won’t be confused or abuse it. I want my artists to be self-interested because then I get more information. Like, keep it coming, you know?”

Gabi Abrão offers you permission. She offers you permission to not only to revel in your creative solitude, but to indulge in your performance of self and tap into that eternal frequency of ambient love. “The internet can sometimes encourage us to feel like a lot of things – like love, creativity, information – are outside of us,” she reflects. “But, really, I think it’s all in us already.”

Notes on Shapeshifting will be released on September 13, 2022. Pre-order here.