A Road Back to An Online Life — A Return to Social Media.
I have never been particularly active on social media. Most of my contributions were of my dog who is pretty adorable. My main activity on any of the social media platforms was to lurk and experience vicariously all the wonderful things other people were doing. I also used it for work. It was a valuable tool to maintain professional networks and to promote my business.
But mostly I enjoyed “keeping in touch” with real and less real friends. It was nice to see vacations, family pictures, meals out, meals in, milestones all laid out through a pretty filter and clever caption. I even participated by making less clever but sincere comments from time to time, with or without an accompanying emoji.
Social media allowed me to reach out into the wider world beyond my own. I felt tangentially involved in the lives of friends have not seen or interacted with in a long time and it was pleasant. I felt up to date on happenings with kids, work, family and hobbies. It was engaging without the complexities of conversation.
I even had experiences to share — food and drinks at a dare I say, hip and new restaurant, a scenic picture from a hike, a basil plant that did not die, an unexpected but hilarious dog face.
In sum, social media was a small part of my actual full life and it was lovely, light and fun. Until it was not. Until it became painful.
During the decades of taking care of my Mom, my world had became smaller, more insular. It shrank in imperceptible increments, ground ceded so slowly that it hardly felt like I was giving anything up at all. Cancelling a dinner with a friend because my Mom needs me. Scheduling work around her bathing schedule. Shortening dog walks so she would no be alone when she woke up from her nap. In themselves, these choices just seemed so small that it would be wrong not to make them. But like all small things, they add up over time.
My friends were aware of this before I had any inkling. They would warn me to establish boundaries. At the time, this felt disrespectful to the concept of caregiving. Caregiving is itself a selfless act is it not? How can one put boundaries on that? And caring for my Mom felt good. I was making a good, right and responsible decision to care for her. In retrospect, these decisions feel uninformed and fully unaware of possible consequences.
Since moving back to live with my mom five years ago, those little things I gave up, seemingly so small years ago, are overwhelming sacrifices now.
I have ceded so much of my life that I find myself living in a mostly solitary cage with responsibility, obligation, and dying as constant companions.
I feel responsible for the care of my Mother. There is no one else in the family who can or will do it and she does not want them anyway. My Mother only wants me to care for her and finds a way to push away anyone else we have hired or imposed upon to help. My Mother has become spoiled, selfish and entitled but that will be a different post about me enabling her.
As I am not rich, I am obligated to work doing a job I stopped enjoying long ago. But I know how to do it and can eek a living at it working from home, while caring for my Mother, which a friend recently described as a 24 hour a day job.
Most things I do every day are either to stave off the process of dying or to embrace its inevitability. I cook to feed my mother every two hours to stave off her dying. I tend to her medicine so she is comfortable during her journey towards dying’s inevitable end. Both seem like acts of caring but in reality, they are opposing activities in dying’s closing days.
That is the tenuous balance of living and dying I forge every day, every morning, every night. There is no room for joy or peace or respite in my cage. There is just a constant feeling of the walls crumbling inward burying me in debris. Ironically, tragically, the weight of these walls will only lessened upon my mom’s death. Her dying is killing us both. Her physically. Me emotionally and spiritually.
So from this dark place, social media became a painful window into the world outside my cage. To see my friends, people I care for, live their lives brought me no joy, just pain. To be clear, I want those I love to have their lives, all the moments immortalized forever in funny and beautiful posts. But I had nothing to share that was either funny or beautiful. Seeing the vitality in other’s lives only reminds me of what my life once was and waiting to be again. The wait is excruciating.
So I stopped looking, sharing, participating. I just did not want to know. It made me sad, sometimes angry and resentful. Not at those friends or their lives of course, but for me. It was a stark show of the life I gave away and I could not stomach it. So I retreated completely. I uninstalled everything, checked nothing, shared even less.
I retreated not just from online living but from actual live-living as well. Seeing friends stressed me out because I did not know how to answer, “So, what have you been up to?” The only answer I could come up with was, “I am just watching my Mom die. How are things with you?” Subsequent conversations were short and awkward as one might imagine. I stopped talking to friends and started pushing them away. It was easier and allowed me to avoid acknowledging the smallness of my world.
But here is the conundrum. I cannot stay in my cage. I know this.
I have decided for my own preservation, as a genuine attempt at being selfish, to make a jail break. I do not have the emotional reservoir at present to dive into the deep end but can I can dip a toe. It is a process as the adage goes.
I know I am sharing a lot of doom and gloom but there is light underneath. I just have to get there.
First step was to write these words. Second step is to engage outside my claustrophobic world and share it on social media. Seems simple enough.
As of this writing, I have not posted yet. I am gathering my courage. I may take a few fingers of bourbon before I can do it but it will happen. It has to happen.
While not particularly clever or pretty (even with the best filter), this is a first step on the road back to an online life and to the world beyond.
