#amlao

Ever since I started reading The Anxious Generation, even on days I haven't been able to adhere to my social media restrictions (see: nearly every day) I've become increasingly more cognizant of how social media makes me feel.

I think the a-few-months-ago version of me would say that it doesn't really make me feel anything. Which was a positive. I'd often idly scroll after a rough shift at work the way someone would chain smoke cigarettes in the parking lot after an adrenaline-fueled heist. The repetitive motion of my fingers and constant stimulation helped to numb my brain that would otherwise be replaying my whole shift and dissecting my performance. How long was that patient waiting for me to get in their room? Maybe I should've charted that clinician interaction. Are my coworkers wondering why my time management isn't better this far along?

But as far back as 5-10 years ago, I had a sneaking suspicion that my brain capacity and attention span wasn't what it used to be. What happened to the brain that would read a 500-page novel in one afternoon because I was bored? What happened to the brain that didn't feel like trying something new was an insurmountable task? The brain that could suspend its disinterest or boredom for more than four seconds?

I think I really started to notice this effect when TikTok surfaced. Though my attention span had been slowly dwindling for quite some time, my bar for adequate mental stimulation ramped up so swiftly during 2020 that nothing that didn't draw me in instantaneously was worth my time. I would stay up all night in an endless scroll loop, almost hoping my phone would die to sever the hold my phone had on my eyeballs.

So, starting this month, I gave myself five fifteen-minute segments per day to scroll social media. And while this hasn't always worked, and my withdrawing brain has found ways to try and circumvent these rules ("I got pulled away and started texting during my 15 minutes, so I need another 15 minutes now!"), it did make my scrolling more intentional and less mindless. And that led to me starting to realize, 'Wow. What a bunch a junk this all is,'

Ten years ago, I would wake up to 20+ Facebook notifications.

They would all be interesting too.

I often woke up and looked at my phone with the same rush of anticipation you get on Christmas morning, when you realize presents are waiting for you. There was a huge renaissance in both social media and the beauty industry at this time, and I was heavily immersed in both. I was in multiple extremely active beauty groups of locals girls who knew me and recognized me when they spotted me in public. Nearly every notification was a compliment, an extension of friendship, an interesting post, or a piece of juicy gossip that felt highly cohesive with the real world. If I was a rat in a cage, I certainly didn't notice. I felt in control. Every time I hit the button, I was getting the cheese.

Slowly, I started to notice that my notifications were getting more disappointing. I'd click expecting a connection, and instead I'd get a lackluster notification about someone's birthday or a post in a random group. As I scrolled through my newsfeed, I saw fewer of my friends' thoughts and feelings and more ads and content that didn't interest me. My posts and photos that would've gotten ample engagement a few years ago were hardly noticed. Yet, I kept getting on dozens of times a day expecting something different. This is what Jonathan Haidt describes as, 'the wearing smooth of a path in the brain vs. the decisions of a rational consciousness.' I was a rat furiously pressing a button that was dispensing cheese a fraction of the time.

In fact, I may have been pressing it more, since I wasn't getting the dopamine fix I craved.

But now that I've acknowledged it for the problem it is, with every step back I take, I'm realizing more.

1/5: I browse a Reddit snark page about a YouTuber around my age who I've casually watched for several years. She gets so much hate, but nothing she's done has ever been particularly heinous. Her content has really fallen off throughout the last few years, she's posted fewer videos of increasingly less substance and quality, she's gained some weight, and has gotten some plastic surgery that hasn't done her any favors. I feel sad for her. She's always had a lot of extreme highs and lows in mood that have seemed like well-concealed bipolar disorder to me, and I think nowadays, she's struggling with some depression and alcoholism.

People are so fucking brutal to her. Zooming in on screen grabs of her face, talking about how ugly and disgusting she's gotten.

Why am I reading this? Is this making me feel better or worse about myself?

I think about how brutal people could also be on TikTok. The obsession with finding new, ever-evolving ways to tell women how ugly, outdated, and old they look.

At 33 years old, I'm objectively the most enhanced version of myself that I've ever been: I've had a rhinoplasty and braces, my skin is generally completely clear, I have fewer wrinkles than I did in my late 20's thanks to botox, and after six years of weightlifting, I have about the same body fat percentage I did in my 20's but with ten pounds more muscle. Yet, I think I feel more hyper aware of my flaws than ever before.

I notice the minuscule ways my face has started to sag or the way my eye sockets have started to hollow. Younger Me would been stoked to have more visible abs, but I find myself obsessing over whether they just look like fat, or why my stomach isn't totally flat anymore, as if muscle doesn't obviously project outward. I find myself getting nervous as the scale creeps upward, as if this wasn't the direct result of a commitment I made to get stronger, week after week. As if this isn't an entirely reversible consequence of working hard and succeeding. As if, even if it were a bit of extra fat, that's not something I find attractive on virtually everyone else but me.

And while me yo-yo-ing the past six years between my lowest and highest weights of my life due to weightlifting between phases of chronic nausea may be the source of some mild body dysmorphia, I think a lot of the culprit may be external.

Looksmaxxing, fat potential, hip dips, mewing, American Girl Doll teeth, nasolabial folds, millennial pause. I've worked and been immersed in the beauty industry for half my life, and I've never seen such an influx of terminology with the intention of driving self-consciousness than there is now. And listen......I know it's stupid. That's the worst part. Why am I letting someone with an insane filter, whose frontal lobe isn't even developed tell me that I'm not attractive enough?

But I think that the content I consume lives in my subconscious more than I know. When I see people with normal physical variants or subtle signs of aging get picked apart for daring to have confidence, even if I disagree, I subconsciously assume that everyone is scrutinizing me in a similar fashion.

I know why too. To sell things, of course. Keep women consuming content to fuel self-hatred and self-consciousness, keep them questioning, 'Maybe I have no idea what's trending or looks good anymore,' 'Maybe this is a flaw that needs to be fixed,' 'Maybe if I spend more time studying these content creators, I can improve,' and you've got someone who needs your services.

I just can't help but think that it didn't used to be like this.

But Jonathan Haidt explains this too. While Gen Z creators might tell millennials how cringe and outdated they are, this is actually a reflection of the level of pressure and judgment they've felt since the moment their brains were hardwired for peer feedback.

Millennials narrowly escaped it. We got to live an adolescence that was relatively unencumbered by such intense and constant pressure to maintain an online image. Gen Z creators scrutinize because they only know a world of scrutiny. Their barometer for attractiveness is irreparably skewed by editing tools and algorithms that show a pool of freakishly attractive anomalies that one might only see 1-2 of in a lifetime, pre-internet. The men of their generation are so sucked in by porn that they're unable to find true satisfaction in connection and intimacy.

We may be cringe, but at least we know what it's like to be free.

My brain is still recovering from a shift that left my entire head throbbing with stress, and getting little touches and kisses from him during Hozier was merely a tease.

Every week my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are at war with each other.

The fluttering waves of serotonin I get from imagining my face buried in his chest pull the string, unraveling the slipknot squeezing my stomach.

Before now, I've never experienced a true reversal agent to my anxiety.

Doing makeup distracts from it, occupying my brain with a pleasant state of hyperfocus, allowing the anxiety to fade into the background.

Sometimes, thinking of a more manageable anxiety would loosen the knot. Something familiar that I've lamented on for ages, that I've resolved.

If all else failed, I would lean into it full tilt. I drove to take my NCLEX on the cusp of a full-blown panic attack, absolutely screaming That's Amore, which was blaring from the speakers of my car. Better to have the chaos and insanity out in the open than festering inside, I suppose.

But something about Shawn's presence.

The way he lets out a pleasant sigh when we first get in bed together and find each other in the dark, coming together in a long-awaited embrace.

The way he senses and acknowledges my feelings without a semblance of judgment.

Even when I'm embarrassed.

Because I don't cry.

Not normally.

I didn't cry when my first serious boyfriend passed away suddenly.

After my tumultuous, abusive relationship with Logan ended in betrayal, I only cried once. He cried hundreds of times throughout the course of the breakup, throwing himself on the floor, throwing things, ripping off his shirt in an egregious display of narcissistic rage.

I woke up the morning after I knew it had to be over and allowed myself a handful of tearful seconds to acknowledge that it sucks to still love someone you know you can't be with. And then I began the process of moving on.

But something happens when I'm with Shawn. A certain emotional portal is tapped into. It's relief. I'm safe now. Potentially more safe than I've ever felt in my entire life.

But it's also anticipatory grief in the notion that this safety is temporary and fleeting. That in just mere hours or days, I'll be fighting for my life among a violent chorus of beeps and screams and alarms, while having so much responsibility and so little time to carry it out as thoroughly as I desire.

"You never think I'm unhinged for crying like this?" I ask.

"No," he says, casually and sincerely, "I want you to feel your feelings,"

I have never felt more peace and serenity in my life than a night we curled up in his bed and watched Planet Earth, which he had projected onto his wall. There was a thunderstorm outside that you could clearly hear and see through the window. Something about being simultaneously so cozy, but surrounded by the elements just made for a heightened appreciation of the closeness and warmth between us.

I run my hands along his chest and shoulders and I am absolutely fucking losing it. I have never loved anyone so viscerally and intensely in my entire life. The love I feel for him swells within my chest and both pleasantly and overwhelmingly vibrates throughout my sternum, threatening to explode through my ribcage. It's overpowering. It's lightyears stronger than any play-it-cool mind game I've played with any other man and attempted to call it love. For the first time in questionably ever, I don't care how stupid I look. He has to know how I feel.

I could not possibly keep this feeling to myself.

Attached talks about the concept of a “phantom ex” as a deactivating strategy for those with an avoidant attachment style. Essentially, the avoidant person uses the comparison to and memory of their ex as a way to keep their current partner at an arm’s length.

And boy does this ring true for me.

I feel like I am intensely comfortable in the bitterness and passion I feel toward Logan and my relationship and maybe am scared to let go of it.

I don’t ever want him back. This arrangement in my head is contingent on the distance.

There are firm boundaries, even when single. I will never break no-contact. I will never picture him next to me before I fall asleep. I no longer think of him fondly or try to empathize with him.

But the actual era. My actual love.

I like it. Its familiar.

It’s an old friend that’s always by my side.

It’s a predictable story that’s been told hundreds of times.

It’s a battle in my head that once beat me to the ground every day, but with whom I now playfully joust in the corners of my mind.

It gives me a similar passion and fuel as relationships do when I need to access it, but it requires no maintenance or vulnerability.

It’s just there to remind me that I knew what eternal love felt like at one time.

I don’t want to feel it again right now.

But it’s just there to remind me

I hate you and I’ll never forgive you 🖤

But the second I get too comfortable, that bitterness begins to morph into fondness every time and his ghost returns.

Even now. Even in a happy relationship. Even after all these years.

The phantom of Logan materializes next to me while I attempt to plan out a day trip.

“Look who’s using Wikitravel 😜. Haven’t you spent enough time in Lawrence to know where everything is yet?”

Shit. I got too comfortable and now his ghost is back. Shut up, Logan that lives in my head.

But the problem is, the ghost of Logan gets me. He’s very easy to talk to. Almost like a friend.

Shawn isn’t like any other person I’ve ever dated, okay? He’s sweet and authentic, and I want to be a good girlfriend to him. I want to take him to see cool things. I don’t want to get us lost and inconvenience him.

“I’m happy for you,” he tells me, though I’m not sure I believe him. “I see you trying not to repeat mistakes from past relationships, and you look like you’re doing your best,”

The problem is, I say ‘fuck it’ and launch in, that I’m trying so hard to be a good partner, but it’s not exactly natural. I’m so used to being in toxic relationships like ours, full of suspicion and manipulation. I’m trying to correct a lot of my behavior as I go, but I don’t know how much of that to clue him in on. I don’t want to scare him away. I don’t know what the line is between independently adjusting my thoughts and behaviors to avoid problems and not being honest with him.

“I have faith in you that you’ll find a balance,” Phantom Logan tells me, “You’ve always been motivated to work on yourself and have never had reservations about expressing what’s on your mind,”

But I don’t even know what’s normal and healthy. I’m so used to being love-bombed that I don’t know how much we should know about each other at this stage. I don’t know how much correspondence is appropriate and how much is too much.

“There’s no universal normal rate of communication,” he says, “That’s just something you’ll have to figure out amongst yourselves. And I think you can do it,”

I know I should let go. I know I should never let it get this far, and that idealizing that relationship is always the next step in being dragged back into the underworld.

When I was in my early 20’s, I had a complete and utter inability to plan ahead.

I spent much of my time skipping class and wandering around Mass Street frivolously spending money because I couldn’t seem to conceptualize that Current Me was the same Me that would have to take the midterm in that class or accept a grade from that professor or pay that credit card bill. Of course I understood in theory, but the concept of the future always seemed too distant and disconnected to really do anything about.

At this time, I was also dating a profoundly depressed, jobless artist who lived with his parents and had very few aspirations that would amount to a life I could see us living together.

But the thing was, I never pictured a future with him. I only ever considered if the relationship was a good fit on a day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour basis.

We broke up in early 2015, when I was 23. The reason being that I reconnected with Logan and I liked the way Logan made me feel more. That was all that mattered when I was 23.

When I was with Logan, from 23 to 27, was when my adult brain really developed. And that’s when the bridge to the future started materializing in front of me, brick by brick. And because Logan was the most responsible person I had ever dated, a future with him was easy to conceptualize.

He had a family who loved and supported me, who embraced me as part of their family and introduced me as their daughter-in-law, even though we weren’t married. Logan and I planned together how we would combine our last names when we got married, how we would live in Australia together for a few years, and how we would decorate our future home.

Even though we never lived together, we did so many day-to-day domestic things together that it was easy to conceptualize the kind of life a future with him held. In the best parts of our relationship, everything felt fun and easy with him. I remember going to the grocery with him for the first time in Nebraska during the road trip, and joking around with each other hand-in-hand thinking, ‘Even the most mundane things feel fun with him. I hope I spend the rest of my life feeling like this,’

I think that’s why I struggled so much to mentally disconnect myself from him, despite the years of no-contact and the glaring evidence of his abusive behaviors: he was enmeshed in the concept of my future from the very dawn of its creation.

And what I decided in the process of getting over him was, I don’t have to let go of the entire future I built for myself just because he’s not going to be in it. I can still travel wherever I want to go. I can still live in Australia for a few years. I can still play new board games and learn about history and discover new places and foster stronger bonds with my family.

And, so much of that, I’ve been able to do. And now, I can confidently say that I’m doing it for me and that the holes in my chest left in his absence are filled.

Rebecca and I sat in Tabletop Game and Hobby last week, learning to play Azul. She’s a good teacher. She’s patient. She lets us catch up with each other about our lives first, and what our orientation experiences have been like, then gently prods us to start playing. As we move the tiles across the board, her instructions start to click into place and a strategy starts brewing in my mind. I’m content. I missed this feeling.

Just as I start to tire of my favorite song of the moment on repeat, a notification for a new Sawbones episode appears about Leprosy. I love listening to podcasts about medical history and I can’t wait to learn. Not to feel in the loop. Not to share with anyone to impress them. Just for me.

Shawn takes me to a haunted asylum in Liberty. It’s been there waiting for me on the other side of town every time I’ve driven to Jewell, but I never knew it was there. We explore the abandoned rooms and walk hand-in-hand through a dark, ominous hallway of the morgue. I feel an internal, magnetic pull to be physically close to him that I haven’t felt for anyone in a very long time. He takes me upstairs and instructs me to turn off my flashlight and let him lead me to someplace special. On principle, I do not trust men, but there is something particularly authentic and disarming about him that allows me to make an exception this one time. He leads me through the dark and onto the most beautiful balcony I’ve ever seen. Vines and natural overgrowth frame the backdrop, and we’re overlooking the super blue moon and the winery. There are tourists stumbling around nearby, so it feels simultaneously safe, taboo, and secluded. Sitting next to each other on the brick of the balcony, we lean into the most natural, mutually-initiated kiss of my life. I don’t know what the future holds with him, but I know that this was a moment in my life that was always supposed to happen.

In the morning, Shawn messages me, “Here are some pictures of my garden ☺️”

But I’m way past gardening.

I’ve been up all night reading his entire body of work and am balls-deep in poetry from 2017 about his childhood trauma, along with four Reddit tabs open about psychedelic experiences and Jung’s Liber Novus in attempt to better contextualize them.

I feel like I’ve been through an entire spiritual journey before 9am, and I’m not sure I understand half of it. Whether this is due to sleep deprivation, my own lack of intellectual and emotional depth, or him being mildly incoherent?

Still uncertain.

My higher self is banging her head against the wall and sighing, ‘What happened to hot girl Summer?! It’s not Man Embargo 2023 if you just get obsessed with a new man every other week.’

And I really don’t want to.

I knew I wanted to get over Logan.

But not at the cost of forgetting.

Never at the cost of forgetting.

A few months ago, I looked through my old posts and came upon a memory with Dylan where I was at Torreón, and he sent me a picture of himself getting ready for work with an unbuttoned shirt saying, ‘Someday, you’ll wake up to this every morning,’

And that used to be all I thought about every time I went to Torreón. The memory was so raw.

But thirteen years later, I had completely forgotten. I could have gone back to Torreón and never thought about him.

I go months without thinking of him.

And I think that’s how I got over it. We only knew each other for a year, really. We didn’t have that many memories. And slowly, as my life has lengthened, those memories have disappeared into smaller and smaller fractions of my experiences.

And that’s okay.

I don’t need to be stuck in my first love forever.

But Logan.

It’s different.

I still have yet to feel that kind of love again, that kind of peace and safety.

I still have yet to be seen and known on that level with any other man. Validation-seeking narcissism be damned, I never felt like I was perceived as a caricature or a fantasy to Logan in the same way I have been to other men. He may not have always liked what he saw or valued me like I deserved, but he saw my soul. He understood who I was.

Which was oddly preferable. While neither are acceptable for me long-term, I would rather been seen and undervalued than eternally misunderstood. There is no lonelier feeling than being unseen in a relationship.

I don’t want to forget the memories. I don’t want to be in love with him, but if that’s what I’d have to give up to not, I’m keeping the memories. At least for now.

I don’t want to trade away the happiest moments of my life. I need to know that I can feel like that again.

It’s becoming harder and harder to remember.

My relationship with Matt feels so sparkless and hollow, but I’ve lived in that for so long that the juxtaposition of that to the former spark doesn’t hurt me anymore. I’m forgetting what it was like on the other side.

Sometimes, I try to imagine what it would be like to be with a partner I have that passionate love with. But not Logan. Just…someone of my own creation. But my ability to picture it dwindling.

For years, that bright, hot love burned a hole in my chest and I felt the absence of it every day.

But it’s closing up now, and I’m no longer constantly aware of what I “should” feel like.

But I just know this isn’t it.

I shouldn’t be keeping Matt in a relationship like this. If a partner felt this way about me, I’d want them to let me go.

But I’ve tried letting him go, and he doesn’t want to, and I’m also terrified to be alone.

But you have to learn to be alone eventually, something inside me tells myself.

But, why?

For the most part, I’m over it, I keep telling myself.

But once in awhile, I have a really vivid dream about him. His mannerisms, his voice, the way his touch felt all come back with such intensity.

In this dream, I was visiting his grandparents for Christmas, for some reason. They had invited me. In the dream-world, I understood that this was something I regularly do, but that I don’t see Logan there. He was either away and couldn’t visit, or I came before him and slipped away before he arrived.

Most of the dream was wholesome but mundane: I chatted with his mom, I helped bring decorations down from the attic, and I caught up with everyone.

Then, unexpectedly, Logan came in. I ducked and hid behind the staircase. I knew I shouldn’t run into him, but the excitement of his nearby presence flickered within my chest, and I secretly craved the confrontation.

And then, he spotted me. At first, we nervously joked around about me narrowly managing to avoid him. Then we warmed up a bit a caught up about what we had been doing the past few years.

At the end of the evening, he cornered me by the staircase and leaned into me closely, until our foreheads were nearly touching and stared at me intensely.

This was a stare I was familiar with. During times our relationship threatened to detonate, he did this as a final plea. He once drove thirty minutes to my house in the middle of the night mid-argument, and the second I opened the door, he grabbed my face and silently stared directly into my eyes. He had a way of looking into my soul with such charged intensity that I was positive he was either trying to hypnotize me or communicate telepathically. His huge green eyes were wide with rabid desperation and the hands he had placed on my face were visibly shaking. “Look at me—I love you,” he said, his voice trembling on the brink of tears, “I. Love. You. Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me. I know you still love me. We can fix this.”

And, as I did many times that he displayed unfavorable behavior, I forgave him. Because whatever he saw in my eyes was right.

I did still love him.

“C’mon, Tay, you know we’re supposed to end up with each other,” he says with a tone that was two parts light-hearted and one part pleading. “When are you going to give me another chance? You’re already part of my family. It wasn’t an accident that we ran into each other. I never stopped loving you, you know,”

And, in that moment, it felt both inevitable and true.

Yes, I thought, this does feel like home. This is what was always supposed to happen.

And then I woke up.

Of course, this would never really happen. I don’t visit his family. My only contact with them is cordial, over social media.

And I would never put myself in such a position to see him again.