Saying goodbye.

Note: This was written in mid-January

Before you get worried, no, I’m perfectly fine. This isn’t a cry for help or anything to be concerned about. But it is a closing chapter of sorts, in the sense that you need one of those to start the next book in the series. I’ve been re-evaluating my life a lot lately, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s time for me to divest from the things that sap my energy and my joy in order to reinvest in the things that truly make life worth living. Maybe you relate to this. Or not- but either way I invite you to hear me out.

The last several days I’ve been sick with one of the nastiest head colds I’ve had in awhile. It might be RSV or the flu. Either way, I’ve spent a lot of time lying flat on my back with nothing to do except scroll on my phone, hack up a lung, or sleep. It turns out the crushing weight of the world and the crushing weight of a viral load don’t go all that well together. As I’ve gotten older, social media and the intensity of online life has begun to feel overwhelming, like a constant droning background noise that’s hard to escape but hard to resist. I’m only human: I want connection, I want to know what’s going on, I want to laugh, and I don’t want to miss out on an opportunity I might only find if I stay stuck there, scrolling and hoping and wondering what’s next. But the cost has become too high. I get tense and aggravated every time I see an advertisement and the beginning of certain songs now make me grit my teeth from the sheer overplay (R.I.P., Too Sweet by Hozier, among others).

Now, I find myself missing the internet of my childhood. Not in its entirety, mind you- the internet of my childhood was a bit too lawless. Elementary schoolers were watching LiveLeak videos of people getting their heads blown off, girls were getting groomed on Kik, and kids were getting flashed on Omegle. But I miss the fractured nature of it. There were sites specifically for children, where we’d play educational flash games in much the same style we’d play a game offline. Or, if we were curious about particular topics, we’d find message board sites for that interest. Those still exist, but social media has become so all-consuming over the last ten to fifteen years that it’s difficult to think of what the internet even is without it. I miss when the internet was a place- a computer that you visited for an hour or two a day if that, and then closed down and left behind while you went about living the rest of your life. When I was young, it was a refuge from my life and a way to connect with people outside the bubble I felt constrained and trapped in. But since then I’ve built a life I don’t need to escape from, and my relationship to the internet and social media has become a drain.

So I began culling things. Over the past year or so, I mass-deleted from my following list and cut my own followers from most of my accounts, and made most of them private. I set time limits on my phone for most apps. While it did make things better by cutting down on the noise, It didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. Instead of honoring the limits I set, I found myself bypassing them to pass time when I was bored. Or, I was finding new nonsense to look at and respecting the letter but not the spirit of the rules I’d set for myself. It would take a larger motivation to finally and fully push me to do differently.

The final few months of 2024 were difficult for me, for reasons I won’t detail here. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the year, or create a coherent image of what it was like without separating it into a dichotomous before and after. I won’t say now that things are better per se, but they are different. Very different. What transpired caused me to reframe and reflect, hurrying along at a greater intensity and clip thought processes that were already in play. People pleasing and fawning behaviors I’ve struggled my entire life to understand and rid myself of came to light and got unceremoniously squashed. I got angry again. I realized that I’d quietly tolerated far too much and for no real benefit. So, fuck it.

Around the same time, the 2024 election occurred, the TikTok ban has come barreling down the track, Elon Musk is apparently the pseudo-president now, and Meta is cozily in bed with the incoming government. So, suffice it to say, it’s felt lately like there’s little reason to hold on anymore. Over the years, I’ve created and abandoned I don’t know how many random accounts on how many random sites I don’t even remember exist anymore. What’s one or two more to add to the pile?

I want boring internet and an exciting life. I want to be engaged with the world, even if it seems like it’s burning. I want to visit this place and then leave it behind when I’m finished with it, rather than living passively in the passenger seat as I’ve driven along into endless consumption. I’ve seen more than enough ads convincing me I need a new viral sweat set on Amazon or gel pens on TikTok shop. I don’t need it, and neither do you. I need my life to be something.

So I am going away and saying goodbye. To an extent- I’m staging a partial exodus from Instagram and Facebook and returning to the old internet. I used to have a little Blogspot blog and a Tumblr blog back in the day where I’d write my thoughts down and then leave them behind. I’m older now and it isn’t quite the same, but I want to create a space to write out my thoughts without seeing who’s seen them or monitoring for comments. Those who care, can, but otherwise it’s okay if it just sits mostly unseen. It’s for me, and that’s alright. There’s no obligation to it for me or anyone else. This is a part of something bigger for me.

2025 has loomed large for me. I’m not a super strong astrology girl, really, but my Saturn return is coming up in a few months and I’m willing to take it as a sign of new beginnings. I feel as though all my life has been preparing me to be 27 and ready for something- as though all of the bullshit and reforming and reorienting and redoing I’ve had to do so far was to make me the person I needed to be for the rest of my life. Starting now. Which, sure, is a very strong statement to make. But I get to make it true, don’t I?

I’m going to be present here sometimes so I can be present in the rest of my life. If you would like to follow along, feel free to come with me. My goal is to post photos of my life, reflections on the world or whatever topics have me up at night, reviews of the long backlog of books I need to get through, and my opinions on music and movies. I am going to figure out how to, in incremental steps, find replacements for the things I’ve relied on social media for, and maybe detail them here. All I know is that I feel ready for it.

Thanks for reading.

Footnote from March:

In the time since I initially wrote this, I’ve had a steady media diet of bad news. It’s come my way with such force and speed that I’ve had little time for anything other than panic, dread, and resentment. It’s probably the worst my mental health has been since 2020. What I’ve said here, on reflection, is more true for me now than it was even a few weeks ago. I will say directly that I am scared and will continue to be scared in the coming months and years, but that allowing my zone to get flooded (a la Steve Bannon, ugh) has set me on edge in a way that has made it necessary for my mental well-being to better align my life with my values, and that has required setting my focus more narrowly on what I can change, and away from what I cannot.

I am determined, as far as I’m able to be, not to allow these changes to steal myself from me. I’ve had other dark periods. I remember what 2016 and 2020 felt like, but I am very different now than I was in either of those years. The impulse to retreat and hide is still my baseline, but I don’t want to give in to that, so I am choosing not to. Now, with fascism not at the door but at the wheel, it’s clear to me than the social media and online worlds have not only played an instrumental role in creating the mess we’re in, but are serving to splinter and distract us from the work in front of us if we are to fight for a country worth living in. And that goes for all of us, not just Americans. Unfortunately, this issue is global. I don’t know that I’ll bunker down here in the States forever and weather the storm in the eye of it, but no matter what, I am forever changed by the last decade and what it has taught me, and I can never look away. So I am shifting my view, but not closing my eyes.