Pantsless Weirdo

A few weeks ago, as our world settled into a collective holding of its breath in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, I logged into Facebook without a specific purpose for the first time in a long time. It was one of those decisions that you know in the moment is not good for you, like swinging into a fast food drive through or saying yes when your friends suggest shots at the bar. A small voice inside of you promises, “this will not end well,” as the liquor burns down your throat.

But.

You’ve done it before and it hasn’t killed you yet and that hit of dopamine that lights up the nucleus accumbens is just too tempting.

Cut to me falling backward into a bottomless abyss after following the White Rabbit. After months of avoiding that type of social media engagement, I was staring at the uninformed musings of family members bent on opening the economy in the face of a merciless and invisible enemy, my pulse racing as I scrolled through comments and cross checked references and searched for facts and science and reason.

I only let myself open social media at the end of the day, when I’ve collapsed into bed just after dinner. It may not be advisable to use a phone in bed, but often the best way to bring myself back to reality is to stop and listen to the steady breathing of one or both of my children beside me in the giant bed our whole family shares.

I stopped using social media on a computer many years ago; I only use it on my phone, and try to do so sparingly. Not checking social media applications during the day has been one of the best decisions I ever made for my own mental health. And using Facebook only for sewing groups and Instagram only for memes/sand cutting/curly hair videos has been an even bigger, more important step toward pruning useless habits from my life.

As a person whose brain is prone to malfunction and as an adult who emerged from tremendous childhood trauma including physical and sexual abuse and unimaginable loss, I have to constantly recalibrate.

Does this serve you? I ask myself.

And often, even when something doesn’t serve me, I do it anyway. Because I am a human and somewhere deep inside the gelatinous blob within my skull lie the remnants of my ancestry as a lizard. That “downstairs brain” part of me doesn’t give a shit if something serves me. It can’t be bothered to listen to the lectures of my higher self about the finitude of time and how I could probably be sleeping right now instead of reading internet strangers’ rabid, misspelled criticisms of the scientific and medical communities.

That part of my brain reaches for the computer in my pocket with no input from the more evolved parts of my consciousness. There is no ego in it, not even any real thought. Like a snake biting furiously, even after its head has been removed, my hand unconsciously pokes for the buttons my brain has been conditioned to understand will deliver that flood of neurotransmitters and sometimes adrenaline.

I have no interest in demonizing all of social media, or even saying that we should stay away from one type over another (though I do have intense privacy concerns related to Facebook, which is another post for another time, but which explains why my children’s faces are mostly absent from social media now). In fact, there is no “we” as far as I am concerned. Every person has to do what makes sense in the context of their own lives.

I think most of us could do with moderation across the board, but it’s not my place to police anyone else when I can barely find a sense of balance in my own life. Every time I think, “yes, I think I’ve got it,” something comes along and slaps me in the face and then suddenly I’m anxiously reorganizing my entire house to avoid having to sit with the complicated, intersecting realities of my own trauma, grief, and pain.

We all cope in different ways. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to understand that coping is exactly what most of us are doing.