#26 The courage to listen to ourselves

on not using social media

I took an Instagram hiatus in April 2021. When I did, I explained in my requisite “taking a break!” post that I needed to go be lost. What that post didn’t say was that I was really, really fucked up, and I needed to be that in private. The post also didn’t mention that being extremely fucked up, and feeling like you are still supposed to manage the veneer of your life so that you don’t lose your career, was fucked squared.

When I came back to Instagram in December of last year it was with trepidation, disinterest, and some insane idea that too much time had passed and that I Owed It To The Internet, or to my career, to once again slap on Instagram. 2021 was by all accounts the entire worst year of my life—and this includes the year I pretended not to be drunk during the workday (when I was) and racked up $10,000 in credit card debt on California Pizza Kitchen. By last December, even though I’d taken that long extended break from Instagram and really being any kind of an effective human, I was still a terrified, grieving, frozen, confused, depressed, lonely, anxious, tired human being who couldn’t recognize herself at all. And I had the very real and convincing thought that I needed to get my shit together enough to be on social media.

So I went back to Instagram. And I tried to make it work. And it hurt. And I left again this past May.

Nothing has made me feel more fucked up than this. And to be clear, it is not the being fucked up that’s the problem, but the idea that our grief and experience of actual life is a liability for our social media presence, or our curated image, or our ability to make a future living. I felt flawed not because I was in a meltdown, but because I couldn’t passably pretend that I wasn’t.

All the arguments that have ever been made about how terrible social media is are correct and relatable. Like everyone else who has written about it, I can confirm it eats time, sucks you into a joyless delusional reality that masks itself as fun, makes you feel like a fraud, makes you compare your insides to other people’s very filtered outsides, validates the worst fears you have about yourself, shapes you into a socially passable caricature of yourself, can make you think and live “in Instagram,” is extractive in that it both steals from you and then requires you to snort it to fill your holes back up, etc. All the arguments about how helpful it has been (to some, for certain to me) are also correct and relatable: most of my IRL friends are people I met on Instagram (or people who recognized me from Instagram at coffee shops that I subsequently made into my friends), I built my business one post at a time, I have a book deal because of it, it sparked a creative aspect of myself I could not have fathomed coming from any other medium, it gave me a microphone, it helped to create a community and give voice to a once extremely unpopular opinion and probably did the most heavy lifting in terms of changing our views on alcohol/the alcohol industry/sobriety/recovery, it is absolutely a tool of the otherwise voiceless, it’s where I do most of my donating to causes I wouldn’t otherwise know about, I found great fitting underwear there, etc.

I mention the above only because these were the known complaints and privileges (and therefore specific flavor of trapped I felt) prior to The Worst Year of My Life, and to explain what Instagram felt like during and after 2021 (TWYOML), the only thing I can think to equate it to was how in 2005 I worked as a public accountant in Silicon Valley from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. where I had to run something called a Black-Scholes model and validate statistical samples of accounts payable and write sentences that only started with “Per review of” and “Per discussion with” and I had a boss who yelled at me until I cried and another who wanted to fuck me and another who did fuck me and every day I had to drive into that job I prayed for a car accident that would maim me enough to keep me out of work but not enough to ruin my life.

My entire body rejected that job and still I made myself go to it because I believed I had no other option. My entire body, currently (and potentially temporarily! I feel obligated to say), rejects Instagram, and still I believe I have no other option but to find a way to make my way back to it, at least before my next book comes out. (And probably figure out TikTok by then, too.)

In no other area of my life do I believe in the idea that one must override their intuition, eat their pain, or kill their soul to keep or attain something “necessary.” In fact, in every other area of my life these are the clues that tell me a person, an opportunity, a relationship, a place, or a flavor of ice cream is wrong for me. When my body says no, I absolutely fucking listen. So why for nearly 2 years now have I consistently believed there is something wrong with me, that I just need to get in a different head space (or take a different tack or loosen up or not read the comments or not give a fuck or try Reels!), that my body is not to be believed, instead of something being wrong with say, using social media. It isn’t a rhetorical question. I seriously want to know.

I know this sounds like an essay about Instagram, but this is not an essay about Instagram¹.

And I mean that. This is not an article about how good or bad it is, or why I don’t use it or don’t want to use it or why none of us should use it or any kind of grand statement about what I intend to do about Instagram. I, like many other people financially dependent on social media, have made that mistake before and I refuse to do it again. We all know it’s a fucking curse! We all know we hate it! We all know that anyone who makes a big claim about Instagram is going to have to eat that shit when they stop selling books or need to announce their new podcast! (Or when they just happen to get mentally stable enough to think they can stomach it and far away enough from the pain to think it didn’t really hurt and stupid enough to try one more time, because it’s fun. And here I’m definitely just talking about me.)

I’m not even sure what this essay is about; I’m kind of figuring it out as I write. But it has something to do with coming out of my little chrysalis in January of this year, and noting how many people wrote articles or created content about divesting from hustle culture, who were kind of, I guess, demonstrating hustle culture. I remember one article in particular that was talking about how we need to detox from hustle culture, and it was written by someone who hustles so much I had to mute them on Instagram two years ago because the amount of work they cranked out made me feel insane and inadequate. And that’s not what actually made it a problem—their behavior wasn’t the issue. What made it a problem was I could see all these people whose words and statements indicated one thing, and whose behavior indicated something totally other, and then instead of seeing that and having compassion for how stuck we all are, I instead rolled up my sleeves and followed suit and joined right in. Or, as Martha Beck put it on our podcast, I realized the pie was making me sick, but everyone was still eating the pie (even though everyone was complaining about the pie!), so I ate the pie harder.

What I mean to say is we might all see something has to change, but then we look around and everyone is still doing the thing that’s making us all sick, so the cost (literally here the actual dollar cost) becomes too great to be the only one to change.

The reason I started writing this particular essay was because one of you last Wednesday (when I sent the Monday email on Wednesday) asked me when you’d start getting the weekly Monday email, and I wanted to respond “oh this is the Monday email it’s just coming on Wednesday this week and I missed last week because I’ve been a little off my game and I’ll be way more consistent and perfect from now on” but then I realized I’ve been saying that same exact thing for 8 months with absolutely no improvement! I am what you might call in a different mode of operating that is not up to my old standards and by old standards, I mean just fucking killing myself. I don’t know what I said in response but I know wanted to give her all her money back because I’d failed her entirely.

Here in this part of my life, still emerging from what felt like that one scene from GOT where Daenerys locks herself in a burning building to hatch her dragons and after is just standing there naked and charred but more self-confident and Queenish: I take my time, I meander, I listen to my body, I write and delete essay after essay because I change my mind and become a different person sometimes faster than I can type, and I miss every single deadline I give anyone. I am certain some of you here, and my agent, and my editor, think I’m a huge flake. But really, I’m just testing out what it might actually feel like for once in my fucking life to work according to the rhythms of my actual self. I have only always hurt myself to produce; I have only always forced. I am trying to see what happens when I do the opposite. So far I mostly feel very apologetic and disorganized, but in general, happier, and for certain more expansive and creative. I’m guessing this shit show of allowing will lead to something more structured and reliable in time, but for now I’m thinking maybe my entire “work ethic” needs to be stripped down to its bones and be rebuilt. I worry I’m just fucking off, and sometimes I am. Mostly though, I’m letting myself become what I’ve fought against being cast my entire life (a slothish, flakish, underperforming person whose heart rate refuses to respond to pressure), in order to finally find something that, I don’t know, feels sustainable? Healthy? Fun??

Last week I read that Kendrick Lamar goes months without a phone (in addition to not having a social media presence). He disappears into his creations, he relies on second-hand information to understand What The Internet Is or what’s happening on it. When I was explaining this article to a friend who I was not sure knew of Kendrick Lamar, I said “Do you know Kendrick Lamar?” and she looked at me like I asked her if she knew what a bagel was, which was the point of the question. Everyone fucking knows who Kendrick Lamar is. My mom knows who Kendrick Lamar is. And Kendrick Lamar goes months without a phone! And Kendrick Lamar is not writing about how terrible Instagram is or Detoxing from Hustle Culture like he’s a victim of it! He’s turning off his phone and he’s making music that my 77 year-old fixed-income mother doesn’t listen to but knows of! He’s not fucking around. In another article, he says:

“If I feel I have to remove myself, I just remove myself. I won’t complain about it. I won’t cause a big blow-up or a big stir and let the world know that the walls are closing in. Being able to be aware [of myself emotionally] and be able to eventually grow— emotionally mature to that level, it may take more time than the next man,” he continued. “That’s why I never point fingers when artists are not capable of upholding themselves in that type of stressful position because some people grow different and it takes time especially…when who they are and who they want to be sometimes gets distorted. For me, it’s all about being aware of how I’m feeling. If it is too much, let me remove myself for a couple of years.”

Yesterday I tried to quote to a friend that Jessie Belle Rittenhouse poem about asking life for a penny and not realizing that life would pay any wage asked of it (I said something like “if you ask for a penny you’ll get a penny but if you ask for a million pennies you’ll get a million pennies” which was incorrect.) I was trying to say: If you settle for this bullshit, you’ll get this bullshit.

I think that maybe is what I’m trying to work out here. I’m pretty sure Kendrick Lamar knows himself, and listens to himself over what our culture tells him he should be doing, or what everyone else is doing, and I’m also pretty sure he’s doing better than most of us. This is also what Fiona Apple does (thanks Mar for that reminder), or quite honestly, most artists whose work I admire. (For instance, Emily St. John Mandel has the worst Instagram account ever (also sorry Emily). Joan Didion and Octavia Butler didn’t have the opportunity to build their careers on Facebook, but my guess is they wouldn’t have. There are plenty of examples of folks who make complicated, unpopular, or misunderstood choices to protect themselves, to protect their art, and/or to prioritize their sanity. Probably to great immediate cost.

As I’ve said, this to me is not at all about Instagram. It’s not about art, either. I think it’s about having the courage to listen to ourselves, even if it doesn’t make sense at all.²

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Ten Things Right Now

An almost sweater-weather playlist, the best podcast I listened to this week, a new study tells us what we kinda already know about addiction intervention, too many book recommendations, too many cat facts, and thriving because we aren’t.

1. The best thing I consumed all week was this podcast between Liz Gilbert, Martha Beck, and Rowan Mangan (already mentioned above but worth mentioning again, recommended to me by Emily McDowell)

2. A very very mixed tape of what I’m listening to this week

3. A small study showed that psilocybin decreased excessive drinking, and then everyone lost their shit (on Axios, Mic; it was covered broadly). I read the study multiple times and I am absolutely not an expert and I’m probably going to fuck this up but I want to mention a few things based on my very limited understanding of interpreting research studies. First, people self-selected into this study, meaning the participants were motivated to change; there was no coercive element. Second, the participants received 12 weeks worth of counseling, and were dosed (with placebo or psilocybin) at 4 and 8 weeks (so, a month after therapy, and two months after therapy). Less than half were women, and 4 out of 5 were white. The change was measured in Percentage Heavy Drinking Days, or days in which participants drank four (women) or five (men) or more drinks in a single day. That number of HDD prior to the study was 52%. At 32 weeks, in the psilocybin group, that was reduced to about 9.7%. In the placebo group, that was reduced to about 23.6%. Both groups had a reduction in PHDD prior to psilocybin or placebo (from four weeks of therapy alone, people drank 30% less). I thought about this study a lot because it was all over the news and everyone got hopeful that we’d found the cure, and then I also started thinking about how Marc Lewis has argued that when people who were ready to change were met with an intervention, success rates increased. My point is, YES to new treatments. Yes, this is great. But also, let’s not forget that addiction persists not because we haven’t found a silver bullet, but because we have a dearth of basic, simple resources and interventions that meet people where they are at. Like supervised injection sites.

4. “I wonder, though, if allowing ourselves to not thrive is actually what thriving is.” Lisa Olivera always saying the things.

5. “The pain of a thousand men that was trapped inside my head.” This article in the NYT which is also what Robert Whitaker has been trying to draw attention to for decades. If you haven’t read Mad In America or Anatomy of an Epidemic I cannot recommend them more.

6. A study on the impact of loneliness on drinking and drug taking during the pandemic. It’s worth resurfacing the statistic that alcohol related deaths increased 25% from 2019 to 2020 (YoY increases are typically around 2%)

7. Netflix has an hour-long special on cats. I watched it, and then I spent the weekend telling my friend Sally surprising and yet utterly useless cat facts

8. ‘I’m more interested in the gym and watching TV’; how Gen Z is acting like they are already basically every person I know in recovery

9. Every A24 Film, ranked; I started with 20th Century Women which was very good and I plan to watch them all?

10. A kid got drunk at a PWC event in the UK called pub golf (as in, pub crawl) that was mandatory, blacked out, hit his head, had to have half of his skull removed…returned to work 6 months later. The firm’s statement “As a responsible employer we are committed to providing a safe, healthy and inclusive culture for all of our people. We also expect anyone attending social events to be responsible and to ensure their own safety and that of others.” That last part basically says: we expect people on drugs we provide (and encourage to consume copious amounts of through normalizing and social pressure) that dismantle the very centers that are responsible for responsibility to be responsible. The whole thing is sad, especially since it’s been 20 years since I was that kid and it was exact same trash set up.

11. The best books I have read on social media/digital interference/attention: Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now, Surveillance Capitalism, Stolen Focus, Four Thousand Weeks, Irresistible

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1. Lisa Olivera wrote about what she gained from taking a step back and so to did my podcast co-host, Emily McDowell; Brenè Brown is on a three month hiatus and with 4.4 million followers, this in of itself is a commentary. There are books on books on books about the damage it does and 346,000 hits on Google Scholar for the term “harms of social media”. “Social media break” has become a fixture of the cultural zeitgeist, a term when searched in quotes has over 800k hits. Every single one of my friends who uses Instagram as part of their livelihood knows intimately: the cost to your mental health, the fuckery of the algorithm, the love/hate but mostly hate relationship you develop over time, the feeling that you cannot escape it—that you must make it work no matter the cost

2. There were a few key pieces that contributed to the writing of this. Emily McDowell recommended this podcast (and here I need to also say Emily McDowell has the best recommendations which you can and should find in her newsletter!), which I listened to in the middle of trying to write this and for which so much good food for thought came. This Mic piece, and this Mic piece, and this Citizen piece on Kendrick Lamar.