The universe sends the flu.
A circuitous route to dominating your phone.
Oh hello, friends! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it! Turns out, when you try to write about mental un-wellness in any kind of way, it takes forever. Because it’s unpleasant, but also important. You want to get it right, but you’re not that far removed from it. Also you don’t want to be a total downer, which is a neat trick because you’re trying to write about DEPRESSION and ANXIETY. Good luck. The f-word shows up a lot.
I wrote lots and lots of other words, too, but they were the wrong words in the wrong order. I tried different words and moved words around. For weeks! Words lost all meaning. Hairy alphabet brain soup. Cry, barf, cry. Bleep bloop blorp.
And then the universe, hilarious as ever, sent me a different f-word. It sent me the flu. Which was wretched but also makes for an excellent analogy.
Here’s how the flu and mental un-wellness (hereafter referred to as “MUW,” which could rhyme with “flu” but let’s say “mew” because it sounds like kittens) are alike:
The effort required to do life is monumental. It doesn’t matter how much you want to do the thing, sometimes the best you can muster is poor. Sometimes the best you can muster is nothing. Accomplishing anything beyond getting to the toilet in time is heroic and necessitates a 24-hour recovery nap. Do not try to snuggle with me.
Your kids continue doing their kid jobs of playing and screaming and making a mess and needing hugs and demanding to be fed at regular intervals. If you’re lucky, your partner is carrying all the grown-up responsibilities, generously and lovingly and all by himself.
It’s exhausting and it sucks boiled sock water and you just want it to end.
An entire chunk of life gets redacted from your timeline. You know there’s something under the black, but what?
That’s it. That’s all the ways the flu and MUW are alike.
How are they not alike?
That redacted part? With the flu, you probably missed a couple of showers and dessert and your kids also having the flu. With MUW, you missed all of that, plus every other big and little thing that makes up a nice, normal life. Even if you were in attendance, you missed it. Even if you appeared to be participating, you missed it. Not flossing, you didn’t miss flossing. But everything else.
You can tell people you have the flu and they are compassionate and understanding and they’ll excuse you from pretty much everything. They’ll pick your kids up from school. They’ll bring you soup.
With MUW you probably don’t tell anyone about it because what do you even say? Maybe you say, “My brain chemistry won’t let me do life right now.” That sounds reasonable, but two problems:
Problem One: That same brain chemistry often involves your most hideous, caustic inner voice, a desiccated hate harpy named Ethel. Ethel berates you incessantly and loudly and puts cigarettes out on your sweet beating heart that’s just trying to keep you alive. So the idea of saying “My brain chemistry won’t let me do life right now” feels like a lie, because “You’re a lazy hammock of rotting fish skin and why did you ever think you could be a wife or a mom or a person you can’t even put on pants. Try harder you shitburger,” is what feels true.
Ethel is THE WORST.
And Problem Two: If you do say “My brain chemistry won’t let me do life right now,” even the most charitable people you know will not understand. They cannot. Cultural conditioning and the limits of human imagination only allow for two interpretations of MUW: either a full speed case of the crazies or a case of being really sad. At best they’ll suggest meditation and feel sorry for you. At worst they’ll judge you and your inherent deficiencies and lack of character and feel sorry for your husband. No one checks in and no one brings soup.
You can take a test for the flu, and if you find out it isn’t the flu, it’s some other industrial-strength virus that will eventually go away. You just have to ride it out, unless it really takes you to town and then probably you go to the hospital where knowledgeable health care providers know what to do and get you all fixed up.
MUW, meanwhile, requires that you identify it through the murky distorting fog of itself, that you somehow communicate it to a qualified professional NOT YOUR GENERAL PRACTITIONER DEAR GOD, and that you participate in treatment as both subject and scientist because there are no tests for it, just your own understanding of your condition and your ability to explain it. And you have to keep participating in these experiments, possibly for years, until one day – fingers crossed – the right information is conveyed in the right way to the right doctor and the right dosage of the right drug(s) is applied, and it’s enough to gag Ethel and wedge her in the trunk so you can get to work untangling the knots in your brain.
Mostly the flu and MUW are not alike, but if you’ve only ever had the flu and you’ve never had MUW, I’m hoping this analogy has done its job without bumming you out too much. Especially since the whole reason I took you down this dumpster-lined alleyway in the first place is because I wanted to set the stage for this next part, and why it matters so much.
See this? This is my really, really good life.
Hot showers every day? The public library? Bananas? Bananas are hilarious! Freckles, daffodils, clean sheets, chickadees, thunderstorms, music? TACOS???
I mean, come on.
And I get to do it with a husband who smells good, a batch of five-alarm kids, two cats that just showed up one day and domesticated themselves, a 130-year old house with intimidating landscaping requirements and in desperate need of new windows, a hopeful oak tree in the front yard, a five-pound bucket of cocoa powder in the pantry, plus friends who make time and sisters and cousins who make me laugh and a mom who comes for Christmas and my favorite coffee mug and stacks and stacks and stacks of books.
Sorry, that turned into an acceptance speech. I’m just so grateful! It’s a gratuitously good, wholly undeserved, simple, unfancy, beautiful life. And in the midst of MUW I missed all of it! I knew it was happening, but it’s like it was happening through a fun-house mirror, upside down and underwater, with Ethel shrieking in my ear.
So you can probably imagine how annoyed I was to discover that I had a different adversary to deal with once my brain chemistry was cooperating, and you know what it was?
It was my phone. 🙄
And I don’t just mean doomscrolling, although that’s a surefire way to knock your double scoop of joy in the dirt. I mean going on Amazon to look for a replacement copy of The Jolly Postman and thirty minutes later I’m about to buy anti-aging cream for my armpits because it’s 10% off. Or I’m watching Princess Bride with my family and wonder if the guy who played Humperdinck is still alive so I get on Google and see that his last name is Sarandon and I have to find out if he’s Susan’s brother and by the time I look up from my phone, Westley and Inigo and Fezzik are already storming the castle. Or I’m putting my kids to bed and I sing two songs instead of three because I want to check how many people have liked my newsletter in the last four minutes.
And it made me mad! I didn’t slog through MUW just to let this silly little rectangle hijack my attention. I’ve got Vonnegut to read and snow to shovel and spaghetti to twirl on a fork. Not to mention my kids and my husband who have waited long enough for a mom and a wife who’s present and available. Why on earth would I give my precious minutes away to a glass-bound bully that fits in my pocket and malfunctions if it falls in the toilet?
So I got serious about putting it in its place. I know this is a thing right now, that many of us are discovering the Perils of Pings, so if you’re also interested in lobotomizing your phone to make it work as a tool and not a tyrant, I thought I’d share some of the things that I’m finding effective.
I thought about which apps enrich my life, or make my life easier, and I tried to delete the rest. If an app’s benefit is outweighed by how much it encourages compulsive behavior, I can it. For me that means yes to Spotify and YNAB and Walmart Grocery, no to Instagram and Amazon and Disney Emoji Blitz. Just for example.
My cat can bypass Apple’s built-in screen time limits, so those are pretty much worthless. Instead, I have a Brick. It’s a little plastic square that lets you block apps on your phone. You can set up different combinations of what’s blocked - maybe sometimes you want to block everything except phone calls, and sometimes you just want to block shopping apps, or games, or email, or whatever. And to unblock them, you have to be able to tap your phone against the Brick. Mine lives on the fridge (it's magnetic), so if I leave home without it, well, I’m Bricked. It cannot block Safari though, so…
I’ve started blocking individual websites. If I visit a website with a specific purpose only to find 30 minutes have gone by and I’m still dicking around, I say to my phone, “You’re not the boss of me!” and I block that website. It’s enough of a hassle to unblock a blocked website on my iPhone that I usually decide it’s not worth it. I have a desktop computer where I can scan headlines and search for recipes and write this newsletter or whatever else I need a browser for, and I’m far less likely to follow the Pied Piper down some rabbit hole than when I’m on my phone.
My people, I blocked Google. This was a game changer. Try it and see if you aren’t gobsmacked by how much random twaddle you’re Googling when you have three seconds of unfilled time, or how often you feel the urge to Google something completely unimportant like “Is the guy who played Humperdinck still alive?” It’s okay to have a question go unanswered, I promise.
Remember when I said my word of the year is spaciousness? Cutting this technological marvel down to size has been incredibly helpful with that intention. Between the Ritalin and the phone boundaries, I’m basically a walking episode of Super Soul Sunday. I mean, I still pick out the good raspberries for myself and give the weird ones to my kids, but I’ve mostly stopped yelling at everyone when we’re trying to get out the door for school, and if that’s not a sign of moving toward grateful presence, I don’t know what is.
What’s good in your life today? As Mary Oliver writes:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
With love,
Kathryn
Love you so much ❤️❤️ thank you for the laughs and tears and joy you bring!! Your writing is such a gift, thank you for sharing it.
Loving these Kathryn ✨