But love, lust, infatuation—for a few moments, I was not sad.
Honk If There’s a Committee in Your Head Trying to Kill You
THE OCEAN GIVES ME PERFORMANCE anxiety about being at peace. The moon is definitely judging me. Dogs know the truth. Babies see through me. Anything natural, anything pure: judging me.
People have said that I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’ve been told that the universe probably wants me here. Still, I choose to feel that I am being judged as a piece of shit by some cosmic arbiter. The thing is, I’m self-centered. I guess I’d prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all. There are so many people and we’re all awful in our own special ways; yet somehow, I’m the most profoundly, existentially awful. It seems unlikely that would be the case. But that’s how I roll.
In an attempt to manipulate this elusive judge, one thing I like to do is play games that elevate superficial bullshit to the level of life and death. My favorite game is the one that I play with calories. Like, I pretend the cosmic arbiter is deeply concerned with my calorie intake. If the arbiter is judging me based on my calorie intake, then I can avoid judgment on a more profound level for worse shit. I can channel my more free-floating, all-consuming anxiety over the uncontrollable (i.e., the inevitability of death) into a much more manageable state of superficial, tangible anxiety. I can obsess about fruit and not my cosmic awfulness.
Thus, I know the caloric content of every single fruit and vegetable. A large apple is 100 calories. A large sweet potato is 165 calories. One thing I like to do is buy the biggest apples and sweet potatoes I can find (like human-head-size fruit, just really roided up and fucked) and still count them as 100 and 165 cals, respectively. Then I like to worry that I am getting fat off the misproportioned fruit. Then I like to ask people in a backwards way if I am getting fat by saying I am getting fat and hoping that they will negate me.
Sometimes the cosmic judge speaks through other people. Sometimes it speaks through my interpretations of how they perceive me (often totally imagined). More frequently, though, the judge speaks through a committee in my head. Right now the committee in my head is saying, Why are you writing about your relationship to the calories in fruit, you privileged piece of shit? Nobody cares. There are bigger issues in the world. What’s sad is that I’m not even taking action on the bigger issues, because I’m too busy thinking about myself. But the committee says they’re real.
The weird thing is that I also sometimes claim to believe that the judge has an opponent. The opponent to the judge is an equally powerful, loving force who always has my back. For the sake of efficiency I’ll call this force god.
I claim to believe my god exists, because I have experienced its presence many times. I have experienced god through other human beings who have helped me. While individuals have let me down, collectively I’ve always been able to find help. My god is a horizontal god who works sideways on earth rather than vertically from heaven down.
Of course if I could choose my dream god it would be heroin. Like, that’s the god I really want—a god who protects me completely from my own feelings and makes me feel blissed out 100% of the time. Except my god wouldn’t be a false god, because I wouldn’t be dependent on anyone or anything for it. And I would never come down. And believe me when I say that I have tried to make many tangible things into this god. And believe me when I say that you always come down.
When I first got sober off the big stuff—alcohol and drugs—not the twelve thousand other things I’ve become addicted to since then, I really wanted a god that I could put in my pocket, like a few pills of OxyContin or a flask, so that it would be close by when I needed it. The Jewish god I grew up with seemed kind of weird and punishing. I really liked the Buddha, because he seemed like he would make me cool. Everyone knows Buddhists are cool. Also, I liked purchasing statuettes of deities in New Age gift shops in the hope that they would “make me spiritual,” and Buddha statuettes make a frequent appearance in these types of gift shops. But then I got hung up on whether my Buddha was the blue medicine Buddha or the Chinese laughing Buddha. So I started obsessing about that.
Then I got deep into the crystal game. I started carrying around special crystals that would ward off specific elements or feelings at various times. I started seeing the color violet everywhere and was like, Must buy amethyst crystal now to reflect my spiritual vision, but then another voice in my head was like, Yo, this is getting expensive for a pile of rocks. Every spiritual trinket I’ve purchased quickly loses its juju. In the temple it’s magic, but at home it just becomes more crap.
Ultimately, I had to accept that god can’t be purchased or harnessed in a particular object. I had to give even my conception of what god should look like to god. I had to surrender trying to conceive of what a higher power could be, with my limited human mind, to the great mystery itself. Otherwise, I was going to make myself crazier.
I still have to surrender my ideas about god on a daily basis. Just when I think I “have it,” it changes. Like any relationship, my relationship with god keeps evolving the longer I stay in it.
The other day, a friend of mine who used to believe in god said she no longer believes and is now an atheist. She made atheism sound really good. I was feeling angry at god at the time and was like: Fuck you, god, I don’t believe in you either, you piece of shit. But then I realized that not only was I still talking to a god I claimed not to believe in; I was talking to god as if god were some douchebro. And a douchebro god is kind of a human conception and probably not god. Let’s face it, any kind of bro god is a human conception. If we can define god as a static entity using our human mind alone, it probably isn’t that rad of a god.
This is not to say that if you conceive of your own god using your mind that it’s an inherently shitty god. I think that we should all have our own gods, and whatever we believe exists does, in some way, exist. But, like, when I imagine god as a douchebro or as an asshole (which I’ve been conditioned to do as a result of being raised in the Jewish religion, where god is kind of a punishing dick), it’s harder for me to find comfort in that god. I don’t really want to go to it for help. Why would I?
God, for me, is more of a feeling, a feeling of peace. I think my god lives in a silence that exists inside me. It’s such a delicious fucking silence, so profound. But this can also get tricky, because if I’m feeling crazy then I’m like, Where the hell is god? Has god abandoned me? Like, no peace, no god. But it’s still better than some bro deity telling me I’m a piece of shit.
Also, the silence is always there. The silence doesn’t go away. It’s just that sometimes I don’t hear or feel it, because the committee is so loud. The committee is a lot louder than the god-silence, and also it can seem more exciting. When the committee tells me about stuff I need to have, or am going to get, it’s sexier than the silence of god. Also, the silence is just there, chillin’, but the committee is working really hard to get my attention. When I’m sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It’s like, Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let’s start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past. Next let’s catalog everything that’s wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don’t have—and everything you should be scared of losing. Let’s begin.
Sometimes I try to placate the committee by doing what it tells me. I shop or eat or send emails I shouldn’t be sending. I chase attention. I watch too much porn. But ultimately, I can’t escape the committee by feeding it anything external or trying to run away from myself. There will never be enough stuff to sate the committee. It only gets hungrier and runs faster.
The only chance I have to find respite from the committee, even just for a few minutes, is to get totally still. If I get really still and quiet, sometimes the committee will talk and talk until it has nothing left to say and then it finally shuts t
he fuck up. It seems counterintuitive to hang out with the assholes in my head who are trying to kill me, so as to defeat them. But this is what I have found to be effective. This is why I have to meditate every morning.
My morning meditation practice is nothing intense. It’s ten minutes, first thing, before I go on the Internet (the committee loves the Internet!). Sometimes I do a mantra or wish loving-kindness upon four people: myself, a loved one, a stranger, and a person I dislike at the moment. Mostly, though, it’s just me staying still long enough to get to the silence under the committee. If I am really still, I get to ask the silence questions and it gives me good answers.
The silence is always there, under the committee. But I usually have to spend the first eight minutes of my meditation getting yelled at by the committee before I get to the silence. Like, mostly I am meditating on how fucked I am.
A typical meditation is: Hare Krishna (you’re an oversharing loser) Hare Krishna (you totally come off as needy) Krishna Krishna (stop texting people back so quickly) Hare Hare (don’t initiate texts either) Hare Rama (your tits are sagging) Hare Rama (your nipples were never that good) Rama Rama (it’s basically over) Hare Hare (you’re basically dead).
Right before the end of the meditation, the committee stops. It’s not gone for good, but it shuts up for a second. That’s when I get the moment of peace I’ve been searching for my entire life. It’s what alcohol and drugs did so beautifully for me at first, before I came down. If I could have stayed drunk all the time, I wouldn’t have had to get sober. But I couldn’t, so I did.
I don’t think my meditation practice inherently makes me spiritual. I haven’t ascended and I’m not enlightened. I’m no better than anyone else (if anything, I just require more help). But what the practice gives me is a chance of staying on the planet. When I meditate, I go from being a 96% impulsive and self-obsessed person to a 92% impulsive and self-obsessed person. That 4% keeps me alive.
It’s like every morning I access this template for pause in my brain. Then, as I go about my day and the voices start up again, I have a frame of reference that these voices might not be the whole truth. They may feel completely true, but there is also a memory of quiet beneath them, which shows that they maybe aren’t giving me the full picture of reality. They might be lying about me being a total piece of shit.
But who really wants to sit quietly and be still with the voices? I certainly don’t. Sometimes I’ll go without meditation for a few days, because I’m having a really good time running my life on self-will and I don’t want god, silence, or the space for reflection to piss on my party. Like, I don’t want to see what I’m doing. I don’t want to see that I’m about to make a mess. The committee is like: You’re killin’ it! Don’t stop! But inevitably, I always crash and return to my meditation practice again.
There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead. If it can’t kill me, it’ll settle for seeing me miserable. It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself. I don’t know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I’m just wired that way. But it’s cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live. I don’t have scientific proof of its existence, and I don’t need it. I’m still alive. So I know it’s there.
I Took the Internet Addiction Quiz and I Won
HOW ARE MY FEELINGS NOT going to kill me? The Internet is going to save me from my feelings. But what is going to save me from the Internet? I am dopamine’s girl. I am a puppy for attention from imaginary people. I am lonely among real human beings and would rather be on my phone than engage with reality.
The Internet has given me the dopamine, attention, amplification, connection, and escape I seek. It has also distracted me, disappointed me, paralyzed me, and catalyzed a false sense of self. The Internet has enhanced my taste for isolation. It has increased my solipsism and made me even more incapable of coping with reality.
Reality was never my first choice. I like that I can be somebody else on the Internet. I like that I can present one facet of myself and embody that. I don’t have to live in a body on the Internet. It’s so much easier to present an illusion of oneself than to contain multitudes. Illusion is easier than flesh. I like that other people can be a hologram version of themselves on the Internet, too. I like tweets and nudes, romantic emails, avatars and dick pics. I like that I get to fill in the blanks. Who are you? I’ll decide.
I’ve long thought that the word illusion meant a better version of reality. But recently, after being forced to mourn a series of illusions—most of them romantic, each of them Internet in origin—I looked up the word illusion in the dictionary. I was surprised to discover that the word illusion actually means “something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.” So, an illusion is not inherently a better version of reality. An illusion is a false version of reality. An illusion is a lie.
This discovery has changed the nature of my relationship with illusion. I feel like I am mourning the death of a whole way of seeing the world. I see more clearly now. I see myself trying to patch a hole inside me that cannot be patched by anything external. I am cobbling together the dregs of what I can still use to get high into a shitty dopamine party. That party is the Internet.
But is my obsession with the Internet actually an addiction? I’ve decided to answer that question by taking a quiz from Psych Central called “Are You Addicted to the Internet?” While the quiz is multiple choice, my relationship with the Internet is complex, and so I have chosen to write my responses in essay form.
1. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
I like to use my iPhone in bathrooms. I’ve spent hours on the toilet not peeing. Sometimes it’s my own toilet. Sometimes I’m out in the world and I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I always tell myself five minutes. It’s never five minutes. I fall down a hole and the vanishing feels good. People think I’m dead. I like it.
I try to set rules around my Internet usage. The act of rule-setting means that I am probably an Internet addict. Like, people who aren’t addicts don’t need to set rules about things. They just do them.
Some of my rules include: 10 minutes of meditation before turning on phone or computer in the morning, no social media before noon, only 120 minutes on social media websites per day, only two tweets per day and only after seven p.m., Internet detox for twenty-four hours on weekend. I break them all daily.
2. Do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
Yes. Of course. Unless the partner is a virtual stranger upon whom I have projected a fantasy narrative and we are making out for the first time in a hotel room.
3. Do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
When something real has to be done, like making the bed or paying a bill, I feel like it is going to kill me. Like, I feel that a cruel and oppressive mother is coming for me and the world is comprised of nothing but Sisyphean tasks, wherein you infinitely push a boulder up a hill and are infinitely crushed. One time I was hand washing underwear in the sink and then I got on Twitter and the sink overflowed and the neighbor downstairs, who just had a baby, sent the building manager up and the building manager busted in and I thought he was a serial killer. So, yes.
4. Does your work (or school work) suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?
My work is online.
5. Do you form new relationships with others online?
I would rather be on the Internet engaging with half-imaginary people in a fake way than in real life engaging with real people in a real way. Not that everything on the Internet is fake. I have forged some deep connections with people I’ve never met (or maybe I was connecting with myself—my own desire for who I wanted them to be) via the Internet. Sometimes I compare the IRL people in my life with the Internet people in my life and I always feel like, Why can’t the IRL people be more like the Internet people? This is maybe because
real people aren’t pixelated. Their mistakes and annoyingness can’t be repurposed into a fantasy. I actually have to see the real people and be seen by them. If people never become real, it’s harder for them to disappoint you. That’s why the Internet is good for sad people. You can be with people without having to be with people.
6. Do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?
It’s going to be the death of my main relationship. The person with whom I am in a primary relationship calls my phone my “boyfriend.” He becomes elated when the battery dies. One time he threatened to throw it out the window. He is way more concerned with the way I use the Internet to shut him out than anything I could do sexually with another person. I tell him that I am not shutting him out. I am shutting out reality. Unfortunately for him, he is real.
7. Do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?
It’s more about the act of being online, itself, than what I am doing there. Everyone knows what I am doing there. I’m tweeting. It’s more about the bathroom thing. I will say to the person with whom I have a relationship “I have to poop.” And then I’m gone for the rest of the night.
Actually, one thing I am ashamed of is that I like “female friendly” porn. Like, I wish that I didn’t like “female friendly” porn. I wish that when I watched Xander Corvus eat “babysitter” Melanie Rios’s pussy, I wasn’t like, Omg he is so in love with her. Like, he has def been in love with her the whole time she has been his babysitter and he has dreamt of this moment and now it is here and he will def want to be with her forever. I wish I wasn’t like that.
So Sad Today Page 5