Every day I thank my lucky stars for the miracle that is Instagram.
Yes, I know it’s much more popular to disparage social media (which I have also done!), to cast it off, to pretend you don’t engage much or deeply or often. I understand that someone made a documentary about how social media is unhinging our youth and exacerbating our in-person awkwardness, tempting us to be off in the everywhen and not offering our undivided attention to the derby before us.
But let me assert on no uncertain terms that social media has saved me from dark moments of isolation, resourced me when the well of my own sanity dried, and kept me alive for the past four to seven years. May I extol upon you (in irresistible listicle form) the counted ways?
On the dark, blustery night between October 25th and October 26th of 2020, as I lay huddled for warmth in the lifeboat of a smallish Airstream inside of a sleeping bag built for two, shared with both a terribly sick human and a mildly neurotic dog, I had my phone, a half a millimeter of connectivity, and 37% battery life on my cell phone. I also had a looming, explosive, and fresh diagnosis bouncing in my brain. No address to call home for another three weeks, a talent for doom-diving, and a few years of skillful recovery practice. In desperate moments previous to this, I would text friends on the other side of the earth who were likely to be awake and available, but in that unyielding autumn moment, just past 3am mountain standard time, I could think of no one.
I opened Facebook and asked for help.
“Who is awake right now and wants to text chat with me?”
Within seconds - the long sort, but still - a message from G, a student from a decade earlier who was stationed in Korea keeping the world pinned together.
It seems I had earned his favor in offering him some shoulder-related yoga to augment what his PT had him doing, and he spoke a sweet, lilting East African poetry even in font. It was 8pm in Korea that Sunday night, and he was just happy to keep me company as I poured out my bevy of worries into his inbox. He let me borrow his faith for a few minutes and held space, until S woke up somewhere between Michigan and menopause and picked up the task. We - S and I - had met virtually in an online course, and she found me and my newsletter to keep in touch.
We don’t have a sewing circle now, but I remember. I remember the willingness and the generosity to be present and bear witness - connections made possible by algorithms and satellites, hormonally-driven sleep/wake cycles, the military diaspora, and the spherical nature of the earth.
The Moonbathers
Sometime later, as my sanity was on full sabbatical, it came to mind that since I couldn’t singlehandedly do anything meaningful to end a pandemic, or cure the misery of my person, that I would take to meddling in other people’s social lives, which is an adorable coping mechanism many of us share. I had noticed so much similarity between these two particular folks I had known in tangential sorts of ways and just couldn’t help myself and introduced them. Via FB messenger.
“Hi, you don’t know each other, but you should. You’re basically the same person. We should all zoom.”
Among the things the pandemic made possible was weird zoom connections in pjs amongst three women who do life in many similar ways even though from the outside observer’s perspective we might be less same. This is the sort of thing that would have fallen off after one or two tries to schedule, in the pre-pandemic days, but in that November as the first surge was surging, no one had anything better to do.We spoke that one time live and synchronously. And since then? We have had a text thread for all of the absolutely bat-shit stuff that life hands out.
Our grouping is not unique, even though we look like Charlie’s Angels and could costume the Met Gala from the flotsam floating in the back of my car in nine seconds flat. In the dark. Without talking. Our thread is so long the beginning is physically impossible to scroll back to. We are all writerly and have synchronously navigated the weirdness that comes around the bridge of the third and fourth decades of life. Unquestionably we have work to do together, much like the ring-bearing minions in Captain Planet.
At one point we elected to refer to our collective as ‘moonbathers,’ - another unique quirk we share is a preference for moonlight to sunlight for our own individual reasons. We threaten to convene again, but as of yet, have not. We maintain an asynchronous and sporadic comm log that would probably be quite profitable, were we to welcome an audience.
Social media is simply a tool, which - like all tools - is as good as it is evil. Yes, inside of every social media platform I engage with someone and their merry band of advertising bots insists that my eyebrows are empirically wrong and that I clearly need strategies for both pregnancy curation and prevention. Menopause? Dating? Tattoo removal? Please, lady, just click on something and throw the AI a bone… Just like the carnival, what you see is principally smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand. Everyone wants your attention and money, and snake oil solutions abound. You can seek out spectacle, or the one-in-a-million chance that you’ll win the duck shooting booth prize, or you can marvel at the talent and diversity gathered for your pleasure today. Now showing, in the palm of your hand.
Right in your pocket.
Surely the twerking tweenagers in the parking garage across from my condo have less frontal lobe development than one might need to skillfully navigate bot-land, but that doesn’t mean it’s an inherently evil place. You can like it or not. Use it or not. Unskillfully bond over your (valid) complaints. Or, like highways and essential oils, use with caution, as necessary, and as god intended.
I believe that social media in any form is a mechanism for modern prayer. A way for us to boldly ask for what we need and allow the mouthpiece of the universe to call back, via thumbs or memes or any of the unlikeliest fellows.
Thanks for reading,
K