I’ve been off social media for maybe four months now. I’ve also cut back my news consumption by about 90%. This isn’t coincidental. My feed drove my news habit; they were co-morbidities.
I’m reading more, but still not enough. I walk a lot, and when I do, I talk to my mother in my head as I approach the one year anniversary of her death. I talk to Dad too. I am repeating myself now, mostly, and I think the talks will end, or become less frequent.
I posted about the deaths of my parents too much, so twitter thinks I like hearing about family members dying. I am not joking. I check in on Twitter, and Facebook, now and then every few days, to see if anyone is engaging with my content (writing, blogging, etc.)
They aren’t.
I glance at the feeds, until I see something that makes me clench up inside. This anger. This desire to bang out a manifesto. To make a statement!
I remember… doing this for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. I start a reply, now and then… then I delete it, and block whoever pissed me off. I close the window. And it’s over.
The part of me that wrote FB posts is withering, thank God. It’s the same brain module that blogs, here, so these posts seem to be fading away as well.
I fast. I fill my apple watch rings, with an hour and fifteen minutes of walking and jogging. I meditate.
I remember. I am grateful. I am worried about how fast time is going by. I dread the next horror that will arise sooner or later. The next person in the hospital. The next late night phone call. The next emergency surgery. The next person I will watch die. I worry about being that person, in that waiting room, going into the OR, with my family telling me everything will be Ok.
I worry about my cats dying. They should go next. I do the pet deaths, it’s one of my jobs in the family.
I try not to worry, because life is short, and you don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying, but the problem is, really understanding that life is short is fucking terrifying. Contemplating death sucks the life out of me, leaving me listless, directionless. I’m never going to accept it. I know that now. I’m never going to be okay with it. I’m never going to believe there’s life after death. I’m never going to be the person who doesn’t feel this way again.
I had a great run, or he had, that guy that didn’t really believe in his mortality; not down deep. That guy who was going to live forever.
God he enjoyed this sense of infinite possibility. Nothing but time.
God he slept easily. What a fool, he was. What a child.
The problem with creative work, is the way time melts away, in the doing of it; flow is wonderful but it’s also a kind of death. Time goes by even faster.
I walk and try to slow down time. I try to remember and be here now.
Then I watch a great deal of television.
I don’t miss social media.
I miss my immortality.
One of the worst parts of losing my faith was realizing how finite life was. I still really can’t think about death all that much. It’s paralyzing. So I keep working to pay for my obligations and find as many opportunities to play as I can.
Even though I know the problems we both have with LDS and it’s view on many things, and even though I’m agnostic (atheist on my cranky days) I am sorry to hear about the loss of your faith, because I feel like faith can help people enjoy life without this paralyzing fear. It’s almost like we need faith because we know about death in a way few animals do.
There are positive ways to look at life and death, but I keep remembering that funny bit from the play “you’re a good man Charlie Brown,’ when Sally is told that we should all live each day as if it was our last, enjoying it to the fullest, and Sally freaks out and screams THE LAST DAY, IT’S THE LAST DAY, ARGHHH!!!!!!!!!