When I was teaching, summer break meant two noticeable changes in my body.
The first was a sigh of relief from my digestive system. It has always yearned to be part of a real, adult society, living amongst the people who get to eat lunch sometime later than 10:30 AM. Luxurious noon lunches were an oasis for the delicate lining of my stomach.
The second was a bum arm.
Specifically, a bum right arm. More specifically, a bum set of interconnected muscles from the right side of my neck to my fingers. Within a few days of being at home, they would all draw upward toward my earlobe, contracting my otherwise human profile into the silhouette of a T. rex.
It was phone arm, of course.
For fourteen years I had a high-horse idea that I shouldn’t be looking at my phone while I was teaching. For the better part of those days, then, it sat in a drawer at the bottom of my teacher desk and pinged helplessly against file folders until I could check it at 3:00.
But then May would come, and I would take my revenge.
I would spend so much of those first few vacation days scrolling that I’d have to invert myself over the couch to watch TV at night. My neck and shoulders hurt constantly, and when I’d finally book a massage, the therapist would ask me what kind of heavy machinery I operated for a living.
It was like being handed a drug each Memorial Day and then having it yanked from my fingers 10 weeks later. Every year. And there was no time for withdrawal symptoms, because in August, the scrolling was replaced with another drug, a better drug: the sweet, sweet martyrdom of overwork.
It was a great way to manage a social media and/or dopamine addiction.
Great, that is, until the sunny, COVIDy day in July when I decided to quit teaching. That was the day I realized that although August was coming, I would never again be able to cast my iPhone back into the fiery desk drawer from whence it came.
Things have been ugly since.
I’ve been through app cleanses and digital detoxes. I’ve used site blockers and a Chrome extension that planted an actual tree if I could stay off Instagram for an hour. I’ve seen great success and tremendous failure; enough to see that neither one sticks around for long.
I’ve made peace with the fact that until the slot-machine dynamics are regulated out of these things, I’m going to be cycling through social media binges and purges for the rest of my life. It’s fine. Existence is a combination of joy and suffering, it’s the journey not the destination, life is a highway, etc., and that’s allllll fine.
What is not fine, however, is for me to make the social media battle worse for you. Maybe you’re trying to cut back, or maybe you’re not (but probably you are). Either way, I feel gross asking others to meet me on Facebook while I’m chewing my arm off trying to leave it myself.
So I’m starting a newsletter.
It’s bothered me for a while that I am so dependent on Facebook and Instagram to let people know where my writing lives. I don’t like using all the data collection and algorithms to my advantage. I REALLY don’t like having to pay ten bucks for even half of you to see a single post. I don’t like that every time I’ve tried to delete them, I’ve stopped my clicker finger and whined, “But it’s for my braaaaaaaaand.”
Puke.
Maybe my someday agent/publisher/unicorn friend (still working on all three) will disagree, but I’d like to start edging back from the author socials. The newsletter is where I’m going to start.
If you sign up, you’ll get a monthly digest of my blog posts, along with some reading/listening/watching recommendations, to your email instead of your socials. You won’t need a nudge from Facebook when I’ve posted, and I won’t need to delete the app from my phone every other Friday so I won’t be tempted to look at the likes and comments.
Seems like a win-win.
You can sign up here, or, if my rudimentary understanding of Word Press works, right below this post. ↓
So do it. Sign up! Then send a teacher something nice. If they’re back in school, they probaby ate two meals before you took a shower this morning.
