It’s getting harder and harder for me to write and send text messages, and I think that’s because it’s not in-person connection and it somehow reminds me just how very apart we all are. As lucky as we are to have it, digital communication does not deliver the same type of energy as “real life” (what’s that?) does. Maybe social media doesn’t feel quite as difficult for me to use because there’s an inherent performance to it. In text messages, the idea is only the people present are involved in the conversation. You’re meant to be expressing yourself as you otherwise would with only them. But what is privacy without intimacy? If there’s no true intimacy in this exchange, then what is there instead?
Lately, I’ve been really emphasizing how much we just do not know about Covid-19, or really about anything, as a way to find calm. There’s something somewhere about naming your fears to help face them, isn’t there? Perhaps the harmful things that come to us in a disguise of helpfulness do the most damage. Calling a monster “a monster” doesn’t stop it from eating you alive, but at least it makes you less likely to invite it to sleep in bed with you.
So, maybe the open knowledge that social media is not “real” makes it easier to express ourselves on. And maybe the pressure to be “real” and “present” in a text message exchange is harder to bear when our concept of what genuine social interaction is more distant than ever.
But then again, nobody knows anything and everyone knows nothing…. I think.
the and times 