I feel attacked

Social media and the orange pistachio crumble millennial body

This is not an opinion piece about social media and its impact on millennial mental health, I wouldn’t undertake such grand projects. It’s not even a piece about social media’s impact on my mental health. This is an extract from my diary on a tired day, after weeks of recognising that my digital life is not serving me well. It offers no solutions.

Life in 2024 gives you many lives to choose from. I get up one morning and I would like to be a girl who tends to a garden of many colours, who keeps no pets because they come and nest anyway next to the flowering greens of many names. Names which I will always remember, along with a couple of uses of the flowers and leaves for this and that ailment. In this imaginary garden, there are books in a little wooden trunk, and only visitors I like enough know that. My friends can come and spend their time here, even if I am not at home, and the birds will recognise them. On another day, I want to be Gretchen from Suits, not Harvey, never Harvey, I wouldn’t be able to handle the stress. Not Donna either, my feet would constantly hurt. As Gretchen, I’ll walk in and around the streets of New York, sure about the world, and surer still, of my place in it. I will solve serious corporate problems and leave home with a smirk that never puts anyone off. And then on another day, I see myself sitting at a corner table at a local cafe, knowing the origin of my coffee beans and writing pages and pages without looking up, the picture of passion and focus in a sea of ting ting. Powered by a calculated run and a hard-bound journal to declutter my mind, managing to do things I said I will do, the embodiment of all good things from YouTube’s productivity algorithm. Less frequently, I imagine myself as a woman who has the time to shop, style, and plan her outfits, photographing wine glasses and translucent orange face masks, running against no clock and lowering a golden fork into a silken avocado toast for effect masquerading as Vitamin E. All of my meandering dreams feature variations of orange cakes- orange cinnamon, orange pistachio, chocolate orange. A kind of citrus featuring next to all the people I could be. Amidst all these possibilities, I live my life like a bad librarian instead- sifting through these lives like titles and cataloguing piles of books on wooden shelves, not reading, not recommending, not connecting the dots. I glimpse into the picture stories Instagram tells like reading the book jackets, and for a moment, catch a glimmer of all possible characters before the light goes out, the battery dies, or sleep finally wins. I wake up with a new possibility, without ever seeing the last one through.

Over the past few weeks, I am feeling bogged down by the weight of these lives, accumulating over my head and finding no solace in the sifting, organising, placing of them. Day after day, I barely manage to choose a viable version of my current self, unable to reply to WhatsApp messages, seeing through long overdue plans, redoing a corner of the house, applying a face mask, or writing a book. The bag of possibilities grows heavier, and churns out cliches where conversations are needed. The thought train inside my head becomes a string of captions and repetitive, meaningless remarks punctuated by yellow smileys, funny gifs, and 4-5 red hearts. 

“We absolutely must catch up when you are in town next!”

“I can’t wait to see you!”

“Blessed. Inspired. Motivated.”

“What are you doing this weekend?”

“I would love to attend this reading!”

“Let’s go here!”

“I am so sorry I missed this.”

“Soonest! Absolutely.”

Under the weight, I experience no fear of missing out. The endless scroll is no longer experienced as a bounty in the world, but as an inevitable lack in my one, small life. These days, I leave Instagram with an incomprehensible urge to peel, scratch, and dig to find something underneath. A wallpaper under a wallpaper, a message under a torn pillow cover, a broken glass bottle, a house under a house…something that leaves my hands greased with the sure sign of having touched something, of having done something. I remember memes about millennials skipping the midlife crisis to adopt granny hobbies- gardening, pottery, macrame, journaling, composting…touching things, making things, smelling like shit, watching them wilt and die. When it gets too much, as it sometimes does, I learn how to digital detox by watching YouTube videos, because technology wouldn’t even have the courtesy to crash against an overload anymore.

Living amongst pre-loved books and discovering notes inside them makes me think- how you can go ages with someone now without knowing their handwriting. Their mark in the world, the way their fingers work a paper ball, straighten it out and fill it with words. I remember my best friend’s handwriting from kindergarten. I can’t remember if that was her handwriting in kindergarten, or is it just my friend I remember from kindergarten, but I remember the way she used to sign my birthday gifts, and the little flowers she made with heart shaped petals with a dark centre, sitting on a long stem with two leaves sitting next to each other. I know my mother’s hand in three languages, copying gurbani in Punjabi, recipes in Hindi, and instructions for our homework in English. I remember my sister’s handwriting as a hand writing from before I was born, my definition of present continuous tense, my gateway into the world of wonder, eager to copy the patterns she made on plain paper. I can see my father’s handwriting in front of me now, signing pages like a doctor, his hands moving in the air above the paper before touching it, words gathering close to the pages before they are put down, like heeding the word of a higher power. I know his signature the best, like two siblings sitting on two steps of a ladder, joined at the hip. Running my hands on my grandfather’s handwriting in his old notebooks, I think also of people who live away from home, of 28 year old men who do not hug and are not hugged for months on end, of girls in student towns who are scared of holding hands, of forgetting smells, of never burning your finger cooking, of never falling out of sight of the GPS and stubbing a toe, of losing touch, of forgetting touch…

My mother’s handwriting

I know from my books and YouTube algorithm that the range of human experience is expanding. I can recognise the Italian coasts, exotic European Church roofs, and cook Turkish food. I have attended Yale and Harvard classes while in the shower. I practise yoga and learn that the range and slowness of the motion is more important than the frequency of it; the fact of it being done, less important than it being felt. But I read my grandfather’s papers, hear my parents’ stories, and I know that my muscles have fewer stories to tell. I forget which fruit belongs to which season, and I never have to remember to get anything I can order off BlinkIt. I don’t know my best friend’s phone number, and I get impatient in a long queue when I have nowhere to be. My mind is staggered at the possibilities 2024 offers, and is flattered when Chat GPT writes a perfect email by following my well crafted prompt. My body adjusts to a new identity every other day, like an old potato sprouting in a clueless home kitchen. Today, it has followed my mind to a cafe which charges rent for a sandwich, chosen a corner table, and is writing away with the ferocity of rebellion in a red hardbound notebook.

An orange pistachio cake is on hold and will be consumed with a golden fork shortly.