time spent offline

time spent offline isn’t for everyone.

In fact, it is for a very select few with a large appetite for life.

It takes a large appetite to decide to go against the grain, the status quo, what they say is just life now, ya know, and say, NO, THANK YOU.

It takes a large, large, large appetite to wake up every day and decide— Yes, YOU decide— what to think, how to feel, what to do; There are no tweets, feeds, notifications dinging at you, nudging you towards what you should think, feel, do in each moment. You must decide: At the crack of dawn, while waiting for your sushi at the counter, and at night when sleep evades you.

It’s just you, really.

It takes a large appetite for life to go on looking for love, connection, community Without a follow/ Without a mention. Trusting life just a little.

Just so you are sure, sweetheart.

When I was in high school, I used to get sent to the principle’s office regularly for wearing inappropriate clothes; Shorts and skirts that made the male teachers uncomfortable, the women seethe— Just kidding! but otherwise I was a good, fairly smart, and engaged student in one of the worst high schools in the city at the time.

This time, the principle was new; new to the chaos, of children that had to grow up too fast, too angry, and so when he pulled out the school agenda to reason with me, that according to the rules, standing with my hands flat to my thighs, my skirt would have to be past my middle fingers, which the one I was wearing wasn’t, I accepted the challenge.

The adults were rookies to me.

It’s funny the things you can get used to. 

I used to wake up to Twitter, the avatars shouting their grievances at me first thing in the morning; Open my eyes, reach under, beside, on top of the pillow until I felt it: Hard, flat, cool— Tap, tap, tap, tap; slide, slide; tap. For years, day after day, I would wake up every morning and before I even had had a chance to fully open my eyes, to grasp at and reorient myself to another day, reality, I would reach for the hard, flat, cool object under my pillow and enter the noise with thousands of avatars shouting their grievances to no one in particular first thing in the morning; the same noise I fell asleep to the night before. For years, day after day, this was how I started my day, how I went about my day, and how I ended my day.

For years, day after day.

I turn 30 this month.

With age, I have become less volatile, more sentimental. “The dots connect looking back,” he tells me over our drinks, blabbering to amuse ourselves; he’s quoting Steve Jobs. I nod, It is true. When the mood strikes, when I feel brave enough, gentle enough to look back, I pull the plastic bin from under my bed and I rummage through the carefully labelled journals from the past four years. For six years prior to switching to paper I used a free online journal, but I have no immediate access to those now. They’re saved somewhere on a USB stick that is no longer compatible with the Macbook I use, and I am too principled and stubborn to buy the adapter for it. But the $2 notebooks, there is a pile of those now; Pages and pages and pages of daily contemplations— daily tantrums— accessible anytime I feel brave enough, gentle enough, to look back; the living adds up. And whenever I look back, bravely, gently, it shocks and delights me to see how all the dots connect.