what is the shape of the space not filled?

Thanks so much everyone for sharing your “This Time Last Year” memories on Friday’s open thread (you can still add yours!). Reading your comments transported me to a simpler, more joyful time, and I’m so grateful.

as ever, sending all my love. Be safe out there. Keep your people close.
xxoodani

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Last June I erased my dating profiles, had my housemate change the passwords to my Facebook and Instagram accounts, deleted every app off my phone, and started wearing a wristwatch to check the time and an analog alarm clock to wake me up. I didn’t spend money on anything but rent, food and bills. I committed to reading 50 pages and meditating for at least 10 minutes a day. In addition, for three months, I would abstain from all social media, in an attempt to unhook my brain from the talons my phone had sunk in me. I called it my “Cave Experiment” (inspired by this post, and this podcast episode), born out of a desire to build new habits and reclaim my attention.

After the 90 days was up, I waded right back in. As I’m sure is surprising to exactly no one reading this newsletter, moderation is, um, decidedly not my jam. I got back onto the dating apps, spent evenings on dumb dates with dull guys. I stopped meditating. I lost my watch and brought the phone back into bed with me every night, foregoing reading for scrolling. And, as with every day under this administration, I got caught in the relentless awfulness of the news cycle, gleaning most of my information from posts by trusted sources on Facebook and Instagram.

Then we entered into Pandemia, and social media went to a whole other level of frenzy. Stuck at home, I, like everyone else, turned even more toward my screen.

*

On June 2, 2020, in response to the state-sanctioned murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, two black women activists in the music industry, Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, organized “Blackout Tuesday.” “Our mission,” as was stated on the event webpage, “is to hold the industry at large, including major corporations + their partners who benefit from the effort, struggles and successes of Black people accountable.” They encouraged people to “…take a beat for an honest, reflective and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community.” There was no mention of a social media blackout. And, we all remember how the co-opting of #BlackOutTuesday burned through our feeds via black squares, and the subsequent concerns and criticisms that arose, out of questioning how effective it was to black-out social media during such a critical cultural moment, and whether or not doing so could be considered activism (let me be clear: it’s not).

Something about that cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds seemed to be some last straw. Something finally cracked open for white people. There would be no more looking away. There would be no more pretending that the system doesn’t only benefit some of us. There would be no more pretending that it would be possible to change the present without reckoning with the truth of our past. Out of folks new to activism’s desire to do something, #BlackOutTuesday set social media ablaze, and though the conversation that sprung from that moment became more about performative activism, and virtue signalling, and I don’t know, critical thinking, that what was originally intended, that fire doesn’t seem to be abating. People I’ve known for years, who I’ve never once heard mention or even acknowledge anything regarding racism in America, are suddenly having conversations about white fragility and abolition, and confronting internalized biases, and reading all the books (you know the titles). There is a deep desire to evolve, to do better, to do the work. I commend the hell out of that. And, I’m weary (and I look at myself with this same weariness; I am not outside of any of this). It is very easy to remain ever on the surface of an issue or topic if there is so much information coming at every moment that it could be a full time job to keep up. But taking in information, while an important piece of the work, isn’t activism. Chasing the call-outs and drama isn’t activism. And spending hours of my day flipping through the Instagram echo chamber of meme reposts and endlessly attention grabbing and soul crushing news to the point of near paralyzation (and yeah, again, I’m looking at myself here) is not activism.

I wonder about what all isn’t being created, all the actions that aren’t being taken in exchange for this constant siphoning of attention.

*

When I quit drinking, time got fast. I came up for air exhausted from years of flailing about in the whitewater of my life, desperate for the calm of deeper waters, terrified of wasting even a moment more. It took about a year to get my sea legs, to settle into the business of creating a life I didn’t want to run from, rather than continuing to only ever tolerate my day-to-day. Early recovery required a level of self-absorption that made me uncomfortable. I knew I was rewiring myself from the ground up, that there were certain things that seemed to come easy for everyone else but always seemed insurmountable to me that I had to address. I knew that if I didn’t take the time to establish a steady foundation, that I might not be in the whitewater anymore, but I would still only be treading water.

Thus, I fell into a sobriety wormhole: I read all the #QuitLit and listened to all the podcasts and started facilitating a monthly peer support group and drank all the lemon water and shared my experience publicly and educated myself on the science of addiction. I spent so much time alone. At a certain point, I started to feel itchy. What was the point of all this work if it was only ever self-focused? I was getting tired of staring at my own navel. I wanted to turn outward, I wanted to go be a person in the world. I wanted more life. I just didn’t know, yet, how to be in what felt like a totally new life.

One January morning, about eighteen months in, post pink cloud, in those quiet first days of a new year before everything revved back up, it dawned on me that the familiar malaise of my drinking days that had permeated so deeply as to feel like a second skin—a skin I was actively trying to hurry up and shed—had settled right back in. I panicked. If I spent all my days grasping for some idea of a big life, I would miss my actual life.

Up until then, I had been approaching sobriety the same way I’d approached everything else in life: With a vice-like death grip of control. I was project managing my recovery, which felt eerily akin to the way I had project managed my drinking: If I could just figure out the exact amount of alcohol I could drink without getting shitfaced or dealing with a hangover, everything would line up the way it was supposed to and I could be normal. In recovery, I was behaving as if as long as I could control everything, I could count on certain results which would get me all the things I was trained to want. I would be a sobriety poster child.

Guess what. I am still so messy. I still haven’t quite figured out how to make much money. I’m still dating duds. I still have no clue what I’m going to do with my fancy degree. I still think about meditation more than I actually meditate (I literally never meditate).

It’s also true that I am more at peace than I’ve ever been. And I wouldn’t have been able to find this peace, to lean into all of who I am, if I hadn’t learned to push back on certain default beliefs that were so close to the bone as to be almost imperceptible.

At its core, sobriety is a relinquishing of control. In order to inhabit my life, I had to surrender to my actual life. My tendency toward over-controlling is one of the reasons I drank to begin with. I needed a way to release the vice grip. Now, when I’m under stress, instead of either speeding up and trying to fix or manage or figure out, or numbing out completely, I take that urge as signal that what I actually need is to slow way down. To let whatever is happening work itself over on me, instead of forcing myself upon it. To see what arises out of all the space not filled.

*

Social media is an exquisite distraction. On it, we project images of our lives. We hide behind our avatars, we say things online that we’d never say in real life. We read the comments despite our better judgement. We stay connected to far-flung friends. We take in information. In Pandemia, we doomscroll. We muse aloud about finding a new rug for our living room and then the next day exactly what we’re looking for shows up in our feeds. We joke, we rant, we grieve. We share what we’re up to. We post photos of our cute-ass dogs (hi).

It’s also a powerful tool of the movement. It helps us mobilize. It attempts to hold killer cops and Karens accountable. It fuels revolutions. It can also be dangerous and harmful.

This week (last week? What even is time, y’all) I read this article: “‘Social Media Distancing’ Is the Key to Quelling the Information Pandemic,” in which writer Ephrat Livni likens the spread of misinformation on the internet to the spread of a virus.

…we’ve never been better equipped to understand the dangers of unchecked language virality — or to flatten the curve. We know that words, weaponized as fake news on social media, can be used to manipulate and undermine democracies, as they did with Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And because of the coronavirus’s spread, we are beginning to better understand the myriad ways that we’re intricately connected, and the responsibilities we bear for our fellow humans.

So, for the greater good, consider social media distancing. With collective action, we can quell the first postmodern pandemic.

Cutesy language aside (social media distancing!), my thoughts keep circling back to this piece. Yes, the virus is dangerous. And, I’d argue that the effects of the pandemic on our collective mental health are equally so. He encourages us to view our interactions on social media through a “public health lens.” Are we vectors for misinformation? Are we contributing to the online frenzy that keeps us wrapped up in the drama but completely disconnected from reality? How do we stay connected to community on social media in a way that leaves us feeling buoyed rather than depleted?

Inside the chaos and terror of living under a Trump administration during a global pandemic, I feel us rambling around in the whitewater. Some of us are struggling for air. Many more of us are succumbing. The stakes are ridiculously high. Every day we are assaulted by atrocities. It’s impossible to keep up, so we look for something to grasp onto. Sometimes, we grab onto others to hold us up, not realizing that we are pushing them down so that we can stay afloat.

What I’m saying is that in order to get out of the whitewater, we have to float on our backs, even if only for short periods of time. Even if only long enough to catch our breath, before we dive back in.

*

This summer, the days bleed together. I sit with myself at my desk, phone in the kitchen. Outside my window, hummingbirds flit about the plum tree, crows sit on the power lines, leaving an impressionistic mess on the hood of my car. Sunshine is rare in San Francisco this time of year, which adds to the groundhog day-ness of everything. I’ve taken on a similar experiment as last summer. Today is Day 4.

Living in pandemia is like sobriety in that there is no escape. I can’t escape my bubble, I can’t escape myself. Even when my skin itches. To escape is a privilege, and I’m thinking about how many of us don’t have that luxury, have never had the option of leaving where we grew up, or taking a break from the systems that are designed to keep us oppressed, or even tuning out the news because what’s happening in the world doesn’t effect us.

We say we want to go back to normal. But normal only kept us treading water. I want deeper water for us all. I want slowing down to be part of the revolution. I want a revolution that lasts, that doesn’t burn out. Or drown.

When I first quit drinking, I was terrified of sitting quietly with my brain, so I filled my days with all the things. But making friends with all the new space in my life was part of the process. And that space is not emptiness. It is potential. A blank canvas. It is in this space that we can shape and mold our lives into something that is uniquely us. That no one can take from us. It is a wellspring from which our work in the world can thrive. The more free we get, the more we see that we can’t be free until we all are free, and the more we’re able to pull our heads out of our belly buttons and help others get free. I know, that’s a lot of freedom. But that’s the world I want to live in. And I want it now.

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani Cirignano, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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