People ask me questions

This is really not an advice column today

So the funny thing about having (not) an advice column is that people are using the form I sent out to solicit personal dilemmas to ask me questions about my own life. I’m amused by this because of course. I’m also concerned because I really get dismayed sometimes when people don’t follow simple instructions. I’m convinced you can trace a direct line from people not reading carefully to the downfall of civilization and honestly, the global vibes out here indicate that I am not necessarily wrong.

Let’s answer some of your questions because I want to pull back the curtain a bit and show you that over here, sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes it’s bleak and weird. Very weird honestly but don’t feel bad for me. These are the lamentations of someone lucky enough to have an audience to lament to.

Are you still friends with [redacted]

I choose to exist on the internet and I have found a way to make it work for me. I didn’t like it for many years and as a result, I pulled back from a lot of things I loved doing including this newsletter and a podcast I made for almost a decade with my friends. I had to pull back in part because my brain is not built to hear what more than one person (me included!) thinks about me and I really cannot receive feedback from more than just a select few people. I really can’t handle too many inputs and the internet has endless input. It’s not good for me and I start short circuiting. Brain fully on fire.

I want to have the kind of brain that remembers birthdays and to call my sister back and what year I met someone and the coffee orders of the people I love and how to get home without a phone and a common point of reference when I am introducing two people to each other and the perfect place to have lunch on Uno Island when you’re waiting for the ferry to Naoshima Island. Instead, modern life dictates that my poor brain contend with a torrential downpour of useless information like the comings and goings of complete strangers. And don’t forget, there is also all the information I’m supposed to ingest about the real people in my life who I love dearly. I think it’s important to know their happenings and big headlines but I don’t need to know that every single day some of them are posting pictures of their lunches, or the minutiae of how they got dressed in the morning or sharing a little bit too much about their spouse to convince themselves that it’s going great all the time. This is too much information for me to possess and process. We know too much of the wrong information about each other in modern life. It’s the damn phones unfortunately and being online too much. This is not good for my poor brain.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my brain and how to protect it because it is not always well. I don’t know why —faulty mood regulation? genetic vulnerability? stressful life events? Probably all of those things— but I have stopped caring why. All of my energy is now spent trying to stay sane. Tremendous energy. Really, you would not believe how much energy and money I expend in service of not losing my mind. It consumes me.

And it must be said that your question had a real ‘am I losing my mind?’ quality to it.