On Facebook, my brain is like a home ransacked by thieves. Every morning, I'd wake to things taken--the present mostly-- and a dreadful mess of broken bureau draws, scattered dirty laundry and torn diary pages. It had been unravelling for years; slowly spinning out of control like a sad, drunken ballerina. I couldn't see straight.
I am ugly.
I am unsuccessful.
I am unhappy.
I am judgmental, labeling my life, defining myself through a catalogue of meticulously phrased posts and comments and digital photographs.
Here I am!
Here is my face!
Here is my body.
Look what I'm eating.
Here are the people who love me.
This is where I live.
This is my dog.
This is my dog.
This is my dog.
I wonder if others are paying as much attention to me as I am to them. I hope others are not paying as much attention to me as I am to them.
Was that too liberal?
Too conservative?
Too stupid?
I'm so stupid.
And that thing I said there wasn't funny. Just weird. Now all those people think I'm a wacko wobbling atop a soapbox.
I'm such a loser.
Why am I checking this again?
More cat pictures,
more carefully contrived gloating,
more sappy song lyrics
and, maybe, one link to an article I'd like to skim.
Mostly though, it's just a carload of damp junk from FREE boxes, cluttering my mind with mounds of molding rubbish.
All of it. Such mind numbing triviality.
So I quit.
With my pointer poised over the mouse, a passing panic attack rattles my thoughts into a tumbling tangle of "what ifs". But after the click, I feel a gummy ghost--like a demon decomposing between my bones--escape from my skin and fly away.
Once like a lonely intern, I ran an individual marketing team, promoting the brand that is my name. But now I retire from this thankless, dead-end job to find my footing on a rugged path of solitude. No, I will not be moving to the woods alone to quietly curse our culture of pocket computers, social media obsessions and idling engines, but to stand here truly alone. To listen to what my soul says, and not what I think my soul should say. And to do what I believe is right, and not just what is easiest and expected.
I understand now why so many of my generation have become petulant alcoholics; raiding liquor stores, parties and pubs, thirsting for their daily dose of oblivion.
