Roots Around the Fence Line
Part 1 of The Countdown to Delete Social Media
Today, I started healing my phone addiction by deleting the Facebook app from my phone.
The thorny vines of capatalist fueled technology were suffocating me. For years, probably, but especially for the past few weeks. I was nursing a mild concussion by staying off screens and enjoying puzzles, cards, and painting.
All the while, reaching for my phone out of habit. I’d find myself scrolling and have to snap out of it. It hurt my eyes to look at the screen. Why did I keep doing it?
When I was a teenager, at my most annoying, I was getting into fights on Facebook. Adults participated, validating my addiction to the drama.
Yes, I was blogging and reading. The internet was mostly good to me when I finally got access to it.
The social media platform was doing something different for me, though. It was giving me the experience of being social without the barrier of my social anxiety or the protection of my budding social skills. Though it became a stage for self-expression, community, and even income, it started as a soapbox in a schoolyard playground.
Throughout my life, I’ve done work to understand how childhood trauma shaped my brain. I’ve come to anticipate when I am about to “go offline”, as I call it. A mean and defensive version of me takes over and pushes the people-pleasing, public-facing self to the back of my mind. I have very little control over what she’ll say. While I used to stand up for her and justify her protection, I now find myself apologizing for her and taking accountability on her behalf.
In the comments of a Facebook post, it is harder to notice the oncoming possession. Ironically, it is when I’m online that I am most likely to “go offline” emotionally. This part of me I work to integrate and heal is immune to my therapy tricks when I’ve been scrolling.
While feeling myself “go offline” happens in all contexts, the internet takes it further.
My brain is elsewhere, perhaps another dimension, and not listening to my body. I cannot regulate what I cannot feel, and the technology makes me numb. For all my sensitivities, there is no sensation to be found when I’m plugged into the social media matrix.
I call it Engagement Brain. The attention is even intoxicating. The more interaction it gets, the more powerful I feel. Even when the attention is negative, disagreeing with me, and I’m in the wrong… I’m not stopping.
This is a behavior I have mostly outgrown, but I can’t say I’ve outgrown it entirely. Now, arguing with people about AI online, I feel her returning.
This urge to fall into rage at a stranger is a deep-rooted externalization of my innards. Always analyzing and defining things around me, earmarking moments for later review. I have a compulsive desire to label every social interaction I have with my many imaginary sticky notes. I must put everything in the context of history, current events, and my own subjectivity.
And, as always, there’s my inner child. The keepers of my well-being were not calm negotiators. I witnessed fights, put-downs, and manipulation as the primary movers of self-expression. While I was delighted to find alternatives as I aged, I was not yet a master of the unconscious behaviors bleeding through. This is the part of me I protect when I “go offline” to become a bitch that cannot be reasoned with.
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The more I learned about social media’s intention to addict the population, the less appealing a good argument felt to me. Additionally, research shows most people don’t change their mind based on the radical, half-baked opinions of a twenty-something in the comments. These practical things are what initially got me to put down my phone when I started getting sucked into Engagement Brain.
Now, I find myself fighting it daily. I’m in poor digital habits, letting myself marinate in the darkest political news in the morning before I even give the day a chance. I am weak to the social engineering. The things these platforms are trying to do to me work because my social mind developed around them like tree roots around the fence line.
The harms of social media stained my adolescence, but it was merely a vessel for the bullying and social awkwardness that would have found me in the analogue world anyway. What really fucked me was the slow march forward into adulthood profiting from my social life existing online. The development of relationships and communities that allowed me to dip in and out, rewarded Engagement Brain, and made my psychology a product to be sold to ad companies.
The true nail in the coffin for me is the surveillance apparatus upping the stakes.
My online opinions and digital footprint are rapidly becoming part of a political overhaul. I no longer feel free speech is protected, and I certainly don’t want to live in the world that tech companies imagine for us consumers.
Is there a way for me to keep what I love and divest from what I hate? I love expressing myself and connecting with people that I live far away from. I hate being used as a pawn in a techno-feudalist nightmare.
Every so often, I imagine ending my social media life. It has been a part of my life for so long that it feels like amputating a limb.
But many people live rich, happy, full lives without limbs.
So, today I start my countdown.
I will continue writing about my journey to divest from social media. I’ll be deconstructing and exploring what it means to me and taking stock of what I will keep in my life and what I will leave behind.
You can follow this blog, which will remain a part of my digital life. I’ve opened a MySpace account in honor of their anti-algorithm stance.
I will be keeping my YouTube for video content and have a personal website to sell services.
My NSFW fan page is here to stay as well.
Thank you for taking the time from doom-scrolling and ad-consuming to read a creative expression by a real writer and artist. Your little act of solidarity here is making ripples toward a better future.
If you’ve divested from ANY tech or have any thoughts, I’d love to read them in the comments.
