Connection

I've developed something truly horrible in the last little while: an addiction that once acquired, is nearly impossible to shake off; one of the most destructive forces there is which eats its way through American life and lays waste to hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It destroys families who can only watch helplessly as the lives of people they love are torn apart forever, their loved one unrecognizable to themselves, and can only wonder whether they too may eventually fall to the same addiction:

I'm leaving internet comments.

Long ones: practically letters and essays in themselves. Comments that I can only hope are read, but finally, unwashed comments meant to be read by the unwashed: exposing the world to my bombastic self I've left only to friends to endure.

I haven't the will lately to get things on paper for regular consumption. Few essays, just procrastination as I have for the same ambitious ideas as ever, but writing is more than ambition. Writing takes will, writing takes nerve, writing takes the ability to persist in spite of no support. I don't have much of that right now.

What I need is connection. In some ways I've done a better job of that than you even know, but in others, I haven't done well enough. Mourners need to be out of their heads, consistently, deliberately, we need the replenishment only supportive friendship provides.

A lot of social interactions can be deeply unfulfilling. You know how it is. All it takes is one person who doesn't mean well and the night out makes things worse. Even as you get all kinds of invitations, you become shy and the urge to withdraw grows. Particularly because you remember all those times when you were probably viewed as that person who meant ill, and you worry about your ability to be an affirming flame in a period of grief.

But I have been so lucky in the face of my father's passing. I found love: a friend of thirteen years who is the best thing to happen to me in... has anything this good happened? Warm and beautiful, affectionate and loving, the most supportive person I know. I now have reason to affirm the flame. I'm happy even as I have to grieve and that fills me with guilt, but I shudder to think what this period might have been without R____. I feel healed around her/them, secure and embraced. The longer I spend in her company, the more my ambition grows slaked, and I no longer feel the need to prove my worthiness to the rat racers I know. If I write a good book or choral work: great, but I suddenly find it more important to have connections with whom I can fan out.

If only they were around in time to meet Dad, if only my Dad could have charmed them even while prodding for our weak spots. I miss Dad terribly, I even miss the ways he tormented me for decades. So many people expose themselves to internet comments because it's a way to make oneself vulnerable to their pathological wounds in a manner that's relatively safe rather than exposing the wounds in real life. Trauma is trauma, pathology is pathology; it's not going away without years and years of work. Part of the reason online discourse is so fraught is that we now have a place to deposit our pathologies, yet at the same time, expectations of in person behavior have gone up. Yelling is less tolerated, manipulation too, tolerance for bad taste jokes is down, so is intolerance and prejudice, yet so too is nearly any disagreement at all. All these trends are utterly enmeshed. We are less tolerant of in-person disagreement because people online are so fearsome that we all fear the shameful nature of online discourse spilling over into our private lives. Is all this a good development? It doesn't matter. It just is.

So even as I'm calmer and happier, no trauma's revealed itself online. I do not troll, I certainly don't plan it, and have only been trolled ever so slightly. The biggest problem of all this? Elon Musk liked my comment: precisely the comment meant to be a high-road response to people's attempts to rage against my thank you to NPR for doing a story on the psychological effects of the Gaza War on Israelis. If Elon Musk likes the comment, does that mean that you should have done the opposite?

I tell myself that the point of leaving comments is to find inspiration for eventual writing, but I know that's bullshit. I leave the comments because I want to be read and responded to. I want an audience, not an audience of anonymous readers, but an audience of potential friends, with whom I can discuss the subjects that obsess me.

At this point, it's fruitless to pretend you can't have friends you never meet in person. In person is obviously preferable, but as we become ever more addicted to social media, the media becomes more and more social, and we find those people who respond to the same niche interests as we do. Some of them act like mole people, and there is no greater friend online than the block button.

And yet the two friends I talk to more than any others are people I've never met but found in facebook groups: one in Chicago with whom I discuss music, the other of whom from Melbourne with which I discuss literature. My life is inestimably richer for their presences in it, however incorporeal.

Yes, I'd rather have friends like this in person, but the internet can make pen pals so easy and rewarding that it's very easy to forego attending to real life friendships for people with whom you can discuss the very small nuances of your niches no one else can find.

And yet the psychic price of these online connections is incalculable. The more holed up in your niches you become, the less you have in common with those who don't share them. Without common frames of reference, people become isolated from those nearest to them. The gulf in values that separates them culturally, politically, philosophically, is unjumpable: even perceptions of facts become incompatible. Even the truth itself becomes a matter of opinion.

Just as one generation passes and another comes, so do forms of communication and connection. This world is so badly in need of connections. Until we can see and touch our friends elsewhere, we are locked in isolation, and nothing can replace the somatic, physiological connection we and I have to people like R____. I was insanely lucky to find them, and it is only luck that brings love together. It makes bearable any form of isolation and grief. I can only wish I found a connection like this one a long time ago, and wish the same to you.

Amen