Social [media/distancing]

All I can do is write my feelings.

Skype is an amazing tool, but often it requires more energy than in-person interactions, and it has none of the casual spontaneity of running into a friend in the street or the wordless community of a bus ride. Skype is draining. Skyping my parents requires me to flip my new septum piercing up inside my nose and to remember how many weeks there are left before London’s clocks change to daylight savings time. Skype reminds me that no matter how much I may need to be held right now, it is impossible. My mental illnesses have been invalidating my needs for as long as I can remember; now they’ve been joined by a pandemic.

I’ve been spending so much more time online. Too much time. Social media has never seemed so fake, so disingenuous to me. I need human contact but I don’t have the strength for words. The people who offer to Skype me and do our own things in the background still require energy for me to interact with them, to set up the Skype call, to hear the faint whir of my laptop speakers as my social anxiety feeds off the consciousness that I feel, in some small, significant, fundamental way, unsafe. It’s not about who the other person is. It’s the fact that there is another person and that I have not chosen to invite their physical form into my space but that they are here anyway, their presence permeating the darkness stamped upon my closed eyelids, their essence lingering and colouring the rest of my week. I do not trust.

In the absence of irl (in real life, as opposed to url/online) contact, my brain clings to the arbitrary numbers of post likes, the insignificance of who retweeted whose #FlattenTheCurve, the ridiculously real pain of being reminded that someone has blocked me and I know exactly who they are. Each action, taken out of its context, is ammunition for my anxiety; and when I am depressed by a sudden lack of routine, my anxiety seeps into the cracks, freezes, and expands as it melts. This person doesn’t like me. That person is ignoring me. My perceptions may not match the truth. I am untruth, I am fiction, I might as well not exist. I am taking more than I am giving: from the earth, from others.

Leave me alone to bore myself to tears as I have done multiple times already.

I think I have a cold. I hope it’s a cold. I have taken care of myself through colds before, but I have never braved a flu alone.

I want to be loved in companionable silence.