Surely sending this will solve the problem it describes

Nate Silver (I promise this isn't about Nate Silver) said something stupid on Twitter about vaccines and it made me angry. I don't even follow him, but a science writer I do follow quote-tweeted Nate's stupid thing to rightfully correct him, and so I saw it, and so I got angry, and I tweeted about it. Then I kept looking to see how people were responding to my tweet, and I started getting angry at myself, then, too.

I started composing this in my head during the three minutes of shavasana meditation I give myself at the end of my fifteen-minute workout. Nate Silver doesn't deserve that time. I don't deserve that abuse. 

That theft of my three-minutes of trying to focus on my breath. There are too many other people's thoughts in my head. On Twitter, Nate is being an idiot about priors and vaccine approval, on Facebook, the community of groups that used to feel like a refuge now feels like a barrage—one mom is worried about timing her kids' breakfast before daycare, another woman needs advice because her boyfriend's best friend's girlfriend keeps talking about weight loss, someone else wants a recommendation for I don't even know what product, I thankfully scrolled away. 

So I closed my computer and reached for my phone to put on a podcast to listen to while I rolled up my yoga mat and walked to the shower so that I wouldn't be tempted to look at my phone again. 

Obviously an imprecise solution! At least, in that thwarted shavasana, the thoughts crowding my head were mine, though any writer who grew up narrating their own life—especially, of course, the most emotionally intense moments—knows that those narration thoughts don't really feel like yours. They belong to the imaginary audience you're always writing them for. I grew up wanting to be a writer but also an actor, so while I sometimes narrated moments like that, I more often lived them for an imaginary camera. On long, boring bus rides, with a soundtrack coming in through your walkman headphones, at least then it's a little less pathological, just trying to montage a slow moment in your life. (How dare I ever judge someone who posts an instagram story of themselves crying. And yet I do!)

There are too many other people's thoughts in my head, and too many of my own are about them. But I am desperate for other people. Yesterday my husband was on a work Zoom with a friend of his, and—I'm always in the frame of his Zoom calls, in the office, and I just basically joined in. I miss talking to people so much! I am barely holding it together every day at daycare pickup, not in an emotional sense but in wanting to stand and talk forever with my son's teacher, to hear about all the details of his day not because I'm overbearing but because I'm desperate to hear about something that happened in a room I wasn't in. I ask him, at dinner, "Who did you play with at school?" and he names the same three kids, it's a thrill of variety when the order changes. (I ask him, "What did you eat for lunch?" and he says "Crackers and strawberries," which is never true but wishful thinking.)

To disconnect myself from all of this, I know need to take on the mindset that no one cares what I think. I don't need to tell anyone that Nate Silver's being an idiot, I don't have a particularly important solution for the daycare mom or the diet-culture casualty. I need to have nothing to say so I can have fewer things to say so I can say the ten thousand things (if a thing is 7.5 words) that I need to say in my book. But it's not just about writing my book, it's about the complete and utter lack of mental peace. But if I quit twitter I will be incredibly lonely. 

"Never tweet," we tweet, but the real trick is I realized that if I don't tweet, I don't check Twitter for replies. But where else is a person supposed to get a little dopamine hit these days?? 

I wrote a newsletter about that fitful dopamine hit almost exactly a year ago. I just opened it up to see what I wrote, and, jesus christ, 

I'm alone and tackling the amorphous work of "researching my book"—a more hypothetical and less immediately rewarding project I have never known! And lonely! ... I just need to keep reading about how our cells got nuclei, and it's actually a piece of science I'm really interested in. But the point is, I'm alone and getting no wholesome rewards, so I go to the morphine-spiked twitter water fountain.

I am researching that exact same thing right now. A bit more alone than I had been then. 

The pandemic anniversaries are coming, already happening for the people who paid attention. We're maybe two weeks out from the last party I went to, where I watched a friend blow out her birthday candles and thought, We're never doing that again. We're five weeks out from The Bad Night. Everyone had their own Bad Night, the night when the reality hit (and maybe a month-long panic attack was triggered), but for me it was the night Tom Hanks said he was sick and the NBA halted mid-game. I started shaking.

I check TimeHop every day to see what my baby looked like a year ago—like a baby!—[fuck me, I just stopped writing to reply to a tweet of Emily Oster's] and I was sort of dreading when we'd hit the two-years-ago pictures of me pregnant. I didn't like being pregnant. But most of those pictures aren't on my phone, they're on my husband's, it's just an occasional selfie of me in a Target dressing room, a reminder of the one maternity shirt I really loved. Being pregnant feels like a weird dream I once had, entirely unreal—at the time it felt unreal, in the immediate aftermath it felt unreal, my mom will sometimes look at me after two glasses of Chardonnay and say, "I made you," and she says it with wonder, but if I say that or think that about the toddler rampaging my house it's with utter mystification. The only thing that felt real about it was the little foot that always pressed out under the right side of my ribcage, and how when he was born I recognized that foot.