Inertia

I know I’ve talked about social media here before – even as yes, you probably found this off the Facebook link – and how much I have come to hate it. Or, my interaction with it. No, actually, I think as a whole I despise it. 

I was an early adopted of Facebook, back when you needed the dot-edu email address to get it. I remember being thrilled to find something a little more static than just AOL instant messenger, and more interactive than Myspace. I remember rushing back to the dorm to log in and see what hilarious anecdotes that my friends from high school – because with Facebook, you didn’t have to let go of those now-tenuous connections – had come up with in my absence. 

I remember when the text before the box where you typed your post changed, and when Timelines were rolled out. I remember not having the word “meme” and cutting, pasting, and printing out funny things I saw on the screen to hang on my dorm walls. I remember being horrified when my little sister joined Facebook when she was 16, and realizing it was no longer just for college kids. For me, that was when I really noticed that huh… Facebook and stuff like that might be problematic sometimes. 

My wife was the second person I knew with a smartphone; the first person I knew worked in tech, so I didn’t think it was much more than a job perk. But the early days of my relationship with Hawthorne, they’d always be sliding their thumb over the same two inches of screen, reading off articles they found or showing me pictures of puppies dressed up in Halloween costumes. In 2012, when I took a job that gave me a smartphone, they helped me set it up. My lock screen was a cartoon of two strawberries with ears and eyes added to make them look like puppies. I don’t remember whatever the cute, motivational message beneath them was, but I remember Hawthorne being very pleased with the strawberry pups. I’m certain if I took the time, I could find that old picture somewhere in the cloud, in whatever corner our collective stuff is stored in. 

Over the next 8 years, social media became their way of dealing with unmedicated ADHD, their never-ending curiosity, and the pain that became so present in their life. On September 19, 2020, I took their phone off the charger on their nightstand. I scrolled their contacts for who I had to notify. They had also been on a couple apps where I knew they had connected with folks, and I messaged the ones who seemed to be mid-conversation to tell them what had happened. It was awkward, but I was in enough shock that it didn’t bother me until years later. 

I downloaded all the pictures without looking at them, and copied a couple phone numbers that I didn’t have. One last time, I watched the screen fade out, the picture of Lucy tucked into their flannel shirt in the NICU. I put their phone in the junk drawer in the kitchen, letting the battery run out.

The next time I saw it, I was packing the house to move. Mice had found the junk drawer and nibbled at the blue silicone of the case. I peeled that off, wiped off the rest of the phone with a Clorox wipe, and packed it away. 

I saw it again, here and there over the years, when I stumbled upon the box. At one point, I moved it to a pile of old electronics that I intended on destroying one day when I had some anger to let go of. 

In the meantime, of course, is when I have adopted the same habits as H. Pain? Anxiety? Don’t want to face what bullshit tasks need to be done? Time to scroll. And truthfully, I hate it. I hate knowing that I can be so distracted, so sucked into this tiny screen that I don’t notice what’s happening around me. I don’t notice the time passing; I do notice the things that don’t get done, the words that don’t get written. I finally took Facebook off my phone, and kept the timer on my Instagram. I figured that would solve the problem. It took a while to realize that it’s harder to market my books without the immediacy of Facebook in my hand, and my author page has suffered. I’ve also lost touch with the local groups of soon-to-be kindergartner families, and the resources I’ve accessed through the platform, like Marketplace. It took a while to realize that whenever I open Instagram to post something, I get immediately distracted, and by the time I’m ready to stumble my way through creating a post, I’m out of time for the day. It took a while to realize that it doesn’t matter if I try to curate what apps I have for media on my phone, if there is something I can continually access (Threads being my current obsession), I am going to reach for distraction. I don’t waste the finite willpower I have on curbing social media usage myself. 

Last week, while I was lamenting this first-world problem, my friend asked why I don’t just get another phone to use just for social media. It doesn’t need a SIM card, they said, just WiFi; I can bring it to events so I can post or do lives, keep all my social media on there, and think of it as essentially a work device. 

Because I’m not buying another phone, I scoffed, then thought about it. 

Currently, there are two old iPhones kicking around my house. One was Lucy’s Nana’s before she upgraded; she gave it to Lucy because “kids and phones,”  and Lucy has played with the (never charged) device for years. To her, it’s just a thin brick that looks like Mama’s. 

And I remembered that I had Hawthorne’s phone. 

After a couple evenings of looking (and trying to avoid the boxes of stuff that are more emotional, and failing), I found it. I didn’t feel any connection to H, even though it’s the last object they ever held in their hand. I plugged it in and charged it up. 

The screen read Thursday, October 15, 12:29 AM (it was actually August 5, 11:14 PM). There was Lucy, peeking out from the flannel shirt and smiling. There were 13 tabs open, including 2 from Facebook, 2 from YouTube, and 3 from Wikipedia about Maren Morris, Billy the Kid, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, plus 3 Google searches for song lyrics, a movie they couldn’t remember the name of, and a sex offender registry. Yeah, that tracked.

I still feel no connection. And yet, I reached out to some of our mutual friends and asked, it’s okay to factory reset their phone, right? They’re used to these questions from me. I need support like that when I let little pieces go. Most of the time, I end up taking a picture of the thing in question, making the FINAL-final letting go a problem for future-me. 

The phone is ready to be reset. It’s charged. I remembered the passcode, only 4 digits.

I’ve talked about doing this, rather extensively now, with my friend (the one who suggested it in the first place) and my therapist. I’ve had it on my to-do list every day for a week. Why do I keep putting it off?

There’s a part of me that wants to sit and explore it. See what stories those old threads might hold. Can I log into their Facebook? Reddit? Tumblr? I rub my hands and cackle maniacally, what havoc would it cause for Hawthorne to reach out to someone that way? Nah, it would be assumed a scam. I don’t really want to put myself through looking for things that might upset me, either. I already have the pictures; the files are on the cloud, and I have their old laptop, too. 

You know what the problem is? What’s stopping me from going through with this? 

I’m preemptively annoyed that I will have to go through the setting up of the damn thing, downloading apps and then, trying to remember my passwords for all the accounts. 

OH, THE HORROR. 

When I admit that, out loud (or, yknow, in text), I feel like such a shallow asshole. But almost immediately, I’m struck that right now? That’s a situation – not even a problem, really – that is absolutely and completely in my control. And right now, I can’t do much about the ICE raids, or martial law in DC, or war crimes and genocide in Gaza, or Category 5 storms approaching the coast. Right now, 8am on a Sunday morning, I can’t contact the school to get more info on what Lucy will need. I can’t go grocery shopping because the child is still sleeping. I can’t update my budget app because the banks aren’t open. 

So in this moment – when my anxiety is low, the house noise is mostly non-existent, the coffee is fresh and everything is closed – I can choose to focus my energy on the things that are in my control. 

The shit that’s going down out there… it’s too big for me to hold at this moment. It’s too heavy, too inactionable at this moment. I don’t want to see it; and I acknowledge my vast privilege in being able to choose that. I am very, very fortunate. And because of that, I need to use it for good. And that means, to me at least, that I need to start with what is at hand. 

Getting social media off my phone and onto something that I have to make far more of a conscious act to pick up will be good for my mental health. The better my mental health, the more regulated I can be, and then, the more regulated I can make the environment for Lucy. When I tell her “let’s focus on what is in front of us,” and “we can only do one thing at a time, right?” they are just as much reminders to myself as they are lessons for her. I cannot personally deliver aid to Gaza. I can write a grocery list and menu to shop mindfully, so that we are not contributing to food waste. I can’t release the Epstein files, but I can pick up the trash the storm scattered in front of my house. I can’t stop this regime, but I can participate in mutual aid. I can’t fix the hate in the world, but I can show my kid the love in it, and how we can return and reciprocate it back. 

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, when you can. Take care of yourself first; we have to. We have to. We can’t pour from an empty cup, and memes just won’t fill it. 

Time to go figure out my passwords. Dammit.