I want my brain back

I woke up the day after my 26th birthday and did the usual. I checked my phone.

Some belated birthday messages, snapchat notifications, WhatsApp voice notes and two voicemails.

Then, I made the rounds. Slack, Gmail, Tumblr, Facebook and then Twitter.

A few minutes later, I opened my laptop and went to the same websites.

Without ever leaving my bed, I was connected to a new world. The same as the old one, but much more condensed.

I think I must be losing my mind. I can’t concentrate, not anymore.

I’ve never had an addiction but I think that this must be it.

This routine that I never noticed being routine.

This inattentive repetition, this automatic carelessness of the mind that declares that connecting to the online world is the most immediate emergency ever. At every second of the day. And when I log in, it’s like sinking into an old, comfortable chair. It’s like coming home, and only then do the alarm bells stop.

Once inside, the daze sets in. It becomes like sleepwalking. Chuckling at tweets, liking some, retweeting others, checking direct messages, chuckling at tweets, liking some, retweeting others, checking messages, replying, tweeting my own jokes and outrage, one second after the other, on wildly different subjects. It’s breathless, it doesn’t afford the time for one to be able to focus an issue before the next one comes. Never anything beyond the surface. All measures, no matters.

The tweets come one after the other like the first snowfall before an avalanche. Though the avalanche itself never comes, all that exists is that heightened emotional state.

And then it’s onto the next website. The same discussions, the same angers, the same anxieties. The same pictures and messages.

This world never changes. There’s no happiness in the chair, no contentedness in the home. Just an absence of the urge to come back, a putting out of the fire, and for some reason that is good enough. Though I don’t know why.

“The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places.

His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity — shock treatments — as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.

The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.”

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

The compulsion is truly apparent when you deny it. I wanted to read this morning, a story called I Don’t Want Much, But I Must Have It All specifically. I sat down on the floor and opened the story on my laptop that was on the bed.

My cat came over, laid her head on my right arm and went to sleep. For her sake, and for mine, I was not to make any sudden movements. I could only scroll up and down the page using the keyboard.

One moment I was mouthing the passage:

“From my home all the doors had gone.
In my home there were no heirlooms
or cabinets with wax masks of forebears.
Through my home an angel passed. And all sins.
My windows looked out on the rains.”

The next, I was retweeting an announcement that the elder George Bush would not be attending Donald’s Trump’s inauguration on the 20th. I didn’t know how I came to the website or when it happened but I was there. The snowfall was back.

So I tried again.

“(My home is now everywhere, / It has spread like an epidemic, / All the homes are homesick . . .)”

Then I was on Facebook. Today is Lauren’s birthday. Lauren and I took Freshman English together in College. She was in the hospital a few months ago after an earlier brain tumor came back. Several surgeries later and she was home recovering, playing with her dog, and condemning the plans to defund Planned Parenthood.

Nothing wrong with wishing her a happy birthday, or checking the pages of Chris and Elizabeth, or the events happening close to me this weekend, or updating my own status before checking the comments on the company’s page.

Again.

“But already since Monday Małgorzata P. has been overwhelmed by the tremendous, tremendous urge to die.”

This time I paid attention. I watched myself open a new tab in an effort to visit one of those sites. I saw my hand type a few of the letters into the address bar and when the autocomplete filled the rest out, I witnessed myself, who was not myself, reach for the enter key.

I jerked my hand back.

The cat jumped up alarmed and confused. I told her that I can’t let this happen, that I needed to get my mind back.

To watch yourself do things that you are not aware of is an odd experience. As if your body and your mind doesn’t belong to you.

That it belongs instead to these impulses, to these websites, these addictions.

It feels like you’re trapped in a suit of armor with a mind of its own, and all you can do is watch and scream as it goes about its day. It’s being a prisoner in your own body.

And you can only free yourself occasionally through attention, which must be kept at all times lest you find yourself feeding desires that are not your own.

I once thought that these urges came when one was bored or in need of some escape, but I don’t think that’s true. Even in doing things that I enjoy, the urge to go away, to log back into the condensed, sleepless world, is still there. The yearning is separate from dissatisfaction or a need for fulfillment, it’s there on its own and it’s strong enough to overpower my own personal ambitions.

I wanted to read a short story but it wanted something else, and it almost won.

I’m not sure how to regain complete authority but it must be done.

To disconnect completely seems unrealistic, but there must be some way — and I think it’s imperative — to be able to make my own decisions. To have a say in how my time is spent, what I pay attention to and to be able to leave and come back from the anxious other world at my own discretion.

Otherwise, this life is not a life at all. It’s a slow and meaningless death.