Everything Happened | vol. 153
Instagram was misery after we moved: documentation of my friends hanging out without me, carrying on just fine without me!! Then there was the fact that another key part of my Instagram experience is smashing the Instagram Explore tab? The Explore tab is like a ghoulish mirror held up to my soul. I’m algorithmically reflected back to myself and forced to reckon with the hideousness, forced to scroll scroll scroll and take in the monster I’ve created with my own ‘likes’ and eyeballs. Some weeks, it’s plastic surgery accounts, or fitness transformations, or women with flawless balayage spelling out “jokes” about motherhood on felt letterboards.
Or else it’s colorful vacations to locales that appear to be the perfect degree of sketchy— enough that they seem daring and unobvious but not so much that anyone’s bougie ass is in any real peril. The type of vacation I am years away from being able to take, because of all the gestating. And even then, it’s like, do you take kids on a “sketchy” vacation? Or even a non-sketchy but nonetheless expensive vacation? You have to, unless there are grandparents who are local, and in good health, and non-toxic. (I’m scheming a co-op system for vacations where we leave our kids with a local couple, and then six months later, they do the same with their kids. A swap. But as I don’t have friends here, we are, at best, years away from this arrangement.) For now, I just scroll and screenshot so I can remember the name of the hotel or park that has me especially covetous. Another bookmark for my digital hoard.
That particular app had become a dark, sludgy place, like Twitter, except not any fun. Instead of benign distraction, I only felt abandonment (my friends daring to exist separate from me), revulsion (letterboard moms), envy (exotic vacations), or a mix of revulsion and envy (fitness transformations, plastic surgery). My phone, and the world it brought to me, was no fun. So I kind of quit. I didn’t quit the way I do in fits when it becomes too addictive and I cast my phone out by deleting all the troublesome apps or having Nick change my passwords. It just wasn’t entertaining me, and in some cases full-on triggering me (lookin’ at you, Kavanaugh hearings), so I stopped picking up my phone so much.
Wasn’t this a good thing, ultimately? I can’t think of anyone who wishes to spend more time on their phone. In addition, I am feeling that third trimester drive to finally be the person I’m supposed to be before the baby comes and blows everything up for a year. Get my shit together now so I can set it and forget it, “it” being the improved ideal hologram version of me whose form I’m always a few good choices from finally assuming. Without my phone, I could be free to focus quietly on these beautiful new habits, as opposed to, say, impulse-buying the $97 good-habit-building course Instagram keeps trying to sell me. (Buying shit targeted to me online: not part of hologram-me!!!)
Realistically, Nick and I are still going to let the recycling pile up into a trash-sculpture every week, a game of recycling chicken, like we’re roommates in an off-campus rental and our names are Brock and Trey. (Haha oh shit I just realized we are literally roommates in an off-campus rental.) And I will continue to not clean up hairballs when I spot them, allowing them to dry and adhere to the wood floor until Desi points them out to me and I act surprised by them. But at least reduced phone time would get me to bed earlier, and having more energy could be the key to getting me at least hologram-adjacent.
The only real change I’ve made in the last few weeks of being bored by my phone is that I listen to a guided meditation every morning from bed. I haven’t found the right one yet, and a lot of them are trying to tell me about how I’m going to be successful that day, which couldn’t be less interesting to me. What I want is for someone to talk me into hauling my ass out of bed, something I have struggled with every morning of my life. I’ve always been enabled by jobs with flexible start times, or more recently by a partner who gets up and does everything while I wait to accept that I’m alive still.
Sometimes, Desi crashes my meditation and snatches my phone from the nightstand and gets mad that the Youtube video accompaniment is just, like, poppies swaying in the breeze. Or he micromanages the meditation. “Mama. Did you breathe? Count to 4.” Or he changes to another video abruptly, which pisses me off but at least my blood is pumping enough from annoyance at that point that I am converted to an awake person.
And then the next thing I do, every day since it came out last week, is reread John Early’s Grub Street Diet. This is maybe my version of doing a morning devotional or scripture reading or whatever religious people claim to do every day. It just makes me feel happy, like the world isn’t 100% doomed.
John starts his days with a Propecia. I start mine with a prenatal and 50 mg of Zoloft. Downstairs, my enabling partner has the boy already dressed and set up with breakfast and a TV show. It’s good that I’m alive still, that we’re all alive still, it’s more precious than I can bear to hold in my thoughts all at once. It’s just that every morning, for like ten minutes, I forget.
yr mate,
Evie
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