Dear whomever,
I reach the office at around 8:30AM in the morning - already, this is a difficult endeavor. The weather here in Amman fluctuates, and we Jordanians are always rushing on the roads. It requires a lot of energy, to make it through the streets, and then - walk up the steps into my Big Girl job, where I am still learning and trying, so hard.
On each floor, we have a flat TV screen; a greeting, a welcome in. The elevator, smelling of Ajax - the lemon scent - opens briskly onto a scene of Gaza: a crying man holds the lifeless form of a newborn, and blood stains his hands and the blanket which wraps the corpse.
I swallow - and move my legs. Left, straight, and into the third right door. I blink and breathe, whisper whatever prayer comes to me. I try not to wonder if God is listening. At my desk - and to keep this slightly anonymous - I read through a report of new, horrible things, in an area not too far from Palestine.
I must send an email, today. I type:
Dear colleagues,
I hope you’re having a good day!
I am not. And I know my coworkers share the heaviness I feel, too. Though by now - months into the so-called “war”, we have grown a sort numbness. People sometimes get used to such strong feelings, and make their way through life regardless. This is grief, I think.
My Instagram feed greets me with more painful, bloody images. Videos, too. Blood spills across the streets of my grandparents home, but Sudan suffers as well. Congo. There is a missing child in Florida. A man across the country, apparently, stole a woman’s car, and she got stuck in the seatbelt as she tried to flee and her body dragged across three miles - more blood stains our streets. Deeper into my feed, a girl greets me, and she says: IF YOU ENJOYED THIS MOVIE, YOU’RE A TERRIBLE PERSON.
In times like this, I think to a quote I saw once. It was long ago, during one of my scrolls. After some digging, I have found it, and leave it here for you to simmer over:
Our brains aren't meant to handle so much information; Humans were evolved to live in communities of mere hundreds, but our generation has access to the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria times a million because of the internet. This is why we always feel so disoriented and uncertain.
r/stonerphilosophy on Reddit
Posted by user orqa
My first Facebook account was made when I was six or seven years old, and I had MySpace way before that. Later, I was on 2014 Tumblr - something that has completely rewired my brain. I cannot decide if for the good, or bad.
Unrestricted access, too. Which means I never learned how to balance my internet usage in a healthy way. My classmates had their phones routinely taken away, for exams or homework or just because. My mother, on the other hand, had a rule for mornings that I feel will summarize the perspective she raised me with: If you don’t wake up in the morning, I’m leaving without you.
I was meant to do what was expected of me. And if I failed, only then would I face the consequences.
What I noticed about my classmates’ was that they were expected to fail from the get-go. They weren’t trusted, and I thought this an odd way to raise children - excessive and problematic, especially in this modern world of technology. I felt we needed to be on the Internet because the Internet will continue to expand with us.
I felt it was vital for us to know and learn how to survive on it. But I forgot, I think, that we also needed to learn to survive without it.
I agreed with my mother’s approach. I was glad for it, in fact. Then, I got older and more frustrated, and the emotions of jealousy and anger and judgment often overtook me. I found myself inflicting that same punishment I once judged onto myself - before the invention of deactivation, I would fully delete socials or photos or even stories I’d posted on Wattpad - anything important or “fun” to me.
This is a behavior of mine that I go back to and try to analyze so often. Why have I always done that? What is it supposed to do for me other than heighten feelings of shame?
The only thing I do know with certainty is that social media overwhelms me. Not only the contents of it, but the expectancy our generation has built to do well in it. At its best, it could be an archive of your life - a scrapbook of memories and discoveries and things you love. But at its worst, what I find it comparable to is a stage. And for some reason, I am always planning a performance - and watching that of others.
It could simply be the creative in me - social media is the only outlet I’ve ever known. Ever since I decided I wanted to be a writer, I knew I needed an audience. And ever since that discovery, I’ve been exhausted thinking up ideas of how to build one. I make and then scrap, I do and then delete.
“Find your niche,” is always the advice. Social media is always trying to place you in a box and this has been my lifelong, relentless journey. Trying to create an “aesthetic” -to make myself a cohesive thing to be enjoyed.
Issue is, I keep getting older. I keep changing. I keep finding new things I like. If I hated ballet flats the other day and now wear them everyday, then…
Who am I? What’s my aesthetic? What’s my category, then?
I’ve recently deactivated my personal Instagram account. I keep feeling overwhelm on what to share. What to post. What to believe in. Here is what you should care about. Are you listening? Here are all the things I’m trying to hold space for. People are dying! I feel the need to make sure I’m always in touch with everyone. A little girl is stuck in a car, surrounded by her dead family. Someone hangs out with someone, and I feel left out. Doctors are begging for help. Someone forgets to reply to me, and I feel disheartened. People are dying. Why didn’t he respond to me?
I feel that when I’m excessively online, I’m thinking less and doing more - in a bad way. I’m scrolling for hours. I’m not learning things. I’m feeling without processing or truly thinking about what’s behind that emotion.
For my junior and senior years, I did not have a Snapchat. This was a relief but it also left me out of so much. All of my classmates were on that app, planning everything on it, coming back to school to discuss what they’d seen the day before - and I was never in on the loop. I felt not having it excluded me from an important part of socializing, of making friends, of reminding them that hey, I exist!
Since then, I can’t shake the fear of fully deleting socials, because I don’t like being excluded. Deleting my social media presence means I’m deleting myself from the world: I am left out of the group chats, I am not sent the memes, my story doesn’t serve as I reminder that I am still here, and, soon, I am forgotten. Poof.
When I do want to be forgotten and self-sabotage, this is a great, quick fix. It is a light form of suicidal ideation, I’ve come to believe, the process of metaphorically deleting myself. Removing the ease of access anyone has to me.
However, there exist the bigger chunks of my life where I want to be surrounded by people - it sometimes isn’t plausible in my mind to intentionally hurt myself like that, even if I’ve proven to myself time and time again that it is helpful to my overall daily life. It does make my mood better. It does improve the time I spend with words and books and things I feel more myself in.
You know, a lot of research says that the reason social media is bad is that it limits the time you spend with actual people. I think it’s more so that it limits what you can talk about when you do see people. If there is ever something to say. If you can even trudge through the information overload you’re constantly experiencing to think of a topic to discuss. If you can even forget what’s going on with this or that war, to focus on how your friend is doing. If you’ve even skipped their story enough times to not know in the first place.
orqa, the infamous Reddit user I quoted above, says we’re not meant to know so much about the world - I think this is especially true. I have walked, for years, with that idea in mind. This is all too much, I always think. We are constantly being fed every piece of disturbing, mentally tolling news. Then - the beauty standards. Then - the new reason why you shouldn’t have read that book. Then - the new author that is famous because of her romanticization of abuse. Then - how to correctly do this or that. Then - then - then -
I know, I get it, I’ve been told. I’m a sensitive person. Maybe it’s true. Maybe I can’t handle everything we’re gifted through our little screens - maybe I am an enigma. It is - after all - such a fine line. But I’ve finally decided to follow this gut feeling. If what I do every time I’m stressed is deactivate, maybe I should just not reactivate.
I’ve taken that step with Facebook three years ago. Life’s quality did improve, I admit. I knew less about the world, about people, about who died and whose birthday it was and how they were celebrating and where they were going.
I am older now and don’t require the constant updates of my friends and the world. I have less energy, anyway, for constant social activities. I work in a sector that keeps me informed from 9-5 on the political context of the world. and especially my region. I am informed, but I don’t want to go home torment myself again - it is playing, already, on a screen across from me, for nine hours a day.
I know it is important - to fight. To make the world better. To push for the difference.
But, well. I defrost the chicken wings and make a salad and light the candles and have dinner with my friends on a random Sunday. I shower and read and clean and write. I try to feel human. I try.
Truthfully, when your people are dying in a landscape that looks exactly like the streets you grew up in, the world around you feels like jelly.
Going through the normal rituals of life has felt like a childish, naive endeavor. I am sitting at a desk eating lunch while a genocide rages on, maybe two hours from where I stand. I could get in my car right now and reach the border before sunset.
I am sitting by the heater in my living room as people bury multiple members of their family at once. Their faces have the curves of my aunts, the sharp looks of my grandmother. A man in the distance wears the same outfit my grandfather once did, when we visited farms and barbecued. But his - stained with red.
What am I meant to do? How do I carry on?
We must learn to balance. We must. This is the unfortunate reality of human life: Selfishness.
I want to keep these light-hearted, I do. The bottom line is - I cannot handle Instagram any longer. It is not directly because of what’s happening, nor is it because of the news on it’s own. It’s because I have no boundaries when it comes to it, no limit to the doom-scroll. I’ve stopped being able to read because I have the attention span of a goldfish. I cannot sleep, because of the blood I’ve seen. And when it comes to writing: I’ve only known to compare and copy, and never to truly create. And ingesting so much information, about so many problems, and so many memes, and so many jokes and comments and -
Well, you get it.
The doom-scroll is telling you something - the multiple videos playing at once, the inability to sit in silence. The sitcom playing as you sleep.
It is all telling you something. Listen.
I am overwhelmed.
I don’t like wearing patterns in my clothes anymore - they overwhelm me.
I took down all the things I had on my walls - they overwhelm me.
My journal sits empty - the idea of words on top of each other, with my messy handwriting - it overwhelms me.
Maybe I’ll be left out, maybe I won’t be in on the newest meme. Maybe for my two-day weekend, I won’t know how things have gone. If they have gotten worse. If someone found a kitten under their car. If my cousins-friends-mom is looking for a moving truck. Maybe I’ll lose touch with someone I care for.
But I trust if my friends are doing something fun when I’m not around, they’ll send photos: we have iMessage, we have Whatsapp, we have phone numbers and apartments and cars.
One learns that the best relationships are those we actively water. I used to post my feelings on my stories in hopes someone paused and asked - started a conversation, perhaps. Maybe this decision is an incentive to ask and be asked, to be more thoughtful in our approaches to each other. To be more thoughtful about what we want to know - and how we move forward with what we know.
It’s been hard for me, reader, to learn that it took more to cultivate a friendship than watching and commenting. Hard for me to learn that it took more than reading a headline to be informed.
My writing Instagram account shall remain for now, as an archive and (hopefully) a portfolio of whatever creative projects I ever finish. And for now - my Tik Tok algorithm gifts me with only the finest cat videos. I am currently reading “All About Love” by Bell Hooks, and after, I’m going to read Ghassan Kanadani’s “Men in the Sun”. I will reach the ends of both, no matter how long it takes me to get through the words.
I can’t help but wonder, though, is approach to social media something we should be teaching our kids?
Are things getting out of hand?
Once, my cousin, at four years old, held up a Youtube video of a cat being abused (and killed). I only got a few seconds of it, but remember vividly his stone-cold face. I never let him see my cat again. My aunt would fuss I was being overdramatic, but I wondered and keep wondering - will these children grow up, desensitized to the world - uncaring in the face of pain?
What is the balance, to this?
Should we know? Should we not?
When I was a teacher, my students, whose ages ranged from from 6 to 13, couldn’t spell without auto-correct and didn’t like writing on paper. In fact, they adamantly refused to do either. I stopped bringing papers and pencils with me to lessons. Even I, with the obvious social media addiction and all, was overwhelmed by the Macbooks, the iPads, the Apple Watches, constantly vibrating and beeping, constantly distracting the pace of my planned lesson.
It was hard to be any more interesting than their screens.
“Don’t you want to know how to spell it by yourself?” I asked one kid, a hyper-active boy who would only go on with the lesson if I beat him at a game of tic-tac-toe.
And he raised an eyebrow at me, and said, “Why would I need to?”
How do we learn to spell, I wonder, if autocorrect is always there?
How do we learn to talk, if we don’t have the chance to?
How do we learn to love, if it’s all covered in blood?
Truthfully, I must continuously resist the urge to ask ChatGBT if what I’ve written is clear - if it’s meaningful, if it makes sense? I am a writer and I do not trust my voice. I often do not know what it is I’m trying to say. Writing - most of the time - feels outside of me. Like a muscle I didn’t know I had, burning.
And I read through my pieces so much, fix them so often, I lose myself in perfection and can’t even read my own handwriting.
But I am 24, reader. I must learn to do things for myself.
I must trust my voice.
Alas.
I hope this week, you don’t get as much information. I hope you don’t have any nightmares. I hope it passes you by peaceful and simple. I hope we sleep and wake to a better world.
But until next time, hug someone you care about for me. Send a text to someone you miss. Tell them you miss them, and that you care for them.
And know, without doubt: I write to you with Palestinian blood, running through my veins. I will feel the grief of the destruction of my people no matter how far away from them I am, no matter how normal my life is in comparison. While we can limit the traumas we ingest with our eyes, and do our best to calm our bodies and anxious minds, it is a luxury many don’t have. Remember that there is still a difference to be made, from the comfort of your ordinary life. You can donate to Gaza here. And you can use your voice to call for a ceasefire, in the instances which you can.
PS: be sure to write back to me:
I actually loved this deep dive into your relationship with social media. I can appreciate how its utility in your life has changed over time and it can be challenging to adapt to maintain healthy boundaries with something that's not supposed to overrun your life. Loving you and supporting your journey <3
Amal this is so beautiful. I have so many feelings about it that I can't really fully describe, probably because of the noisiness in my brain caused by the world. You described everything I've been feeling lately and more, I truly feel at home when I read your stuff. You make me want to write again, more than just entries hidden away in my journal. You also made something finally click in my head about how I want to use social media and pick up my phone less. Keep writing Amal, your words are something special <3