Published September 26, 2023

Monday, the day that just ended, was the first day of the rest of my life. And the first day of my life away from social media in years. I didn’t get much of a break from weighty, existential questions about mortality and the meaning of life, but there’s always tomorrow.

Until there isn’t, I suppose.

The day began with the completion of a trifecta of sorts: the deletion of my Twitter account (I refuse to call the place by its new name). A few hours earlier, I’d used the nuclear option on my Facebook and Instagram accounts. There’s debate about whether LinkedIn qualifies as social media, although I think it’s a reach to group it with the other sites and apps. I still have an account there, just in case, but I don’t consider myself active on LinkedIn.

I’ll let people who are invested in such matters split hairs over whether other places where I have active accounts meet the criteria to be considered social media. They may well be. They may not be.

They don’t come up when I search lists of social media apps. so let’s move on.

Monday, the day that just ended, also began my fall vacation. The first of nine consecutive days off, it began a stretch that is a callback of sorts to 2017, when I came out as trans on my birthday and then had nine (or was it 10?) days off in a row to let the rest of the world catch up to a new understanding of me, and to the real me.

Six years later, some people haven’t caught up with any of it, and that’s OK. I didn’t wait for them, though they are welcome to come along for the ride at any time. Time? I’m running out of it, and with most of my transition goals closed off to me for various reasons, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what success looks like as I try to envision a meaningful last chapter of my life.

I didn’t get more than a few seconds into the waking hours of Monday without being slapped in the face by what could be my future. The local paper, where I worked for more than seven years, did a story on the growing senior population among homeless people here, and the impossible choices they must consider. The story was teased in the morning email I get every day that summarizes that day’s top stories. This one pressed all of my buttons of worry.

Skyrocketing rents. Inflation across the board. Medications. Health care. Food. Social Security. And more. The story’s content prompted editors to drop in phone numbers of housing, crisis and suicide hotlines. As I ran the calculations in my head while reading story after story of people who ended up without a place to live, it wasn’t a line from “The Breakfast Club” I was hearing in my head, but from “Titanic,” a line from someone who knew what was coming.

“It is a mathematical certainty.”

The ship will sink. It’s only a matter of time.

With the help of my ex-wife, I didn’t linger on the helpless, hopeless feelings and instead got out of bed and went to the cinema next door for popcorn, soda and other treats to enjoy while watching a movie I’d bought but hadn’t yet seen. Yep, “Barbie.”

And wouldn’t you know it? Not long into the movie, the title character uttered a line that one story I’ve read aptly called a record-scratch moment.

“You guys ever think about dying?”

So, that’s how it’s going to be today, I said out loud, speaking to Monday and everything and everyone contained within it.

Things leveled off, then leveled up, after that. The movie was great. Brilliant, with a B. Two, really. Loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it. As I told a friend, I laughed, I cried, I howled. “Barbie” won the day.

See it if you haven’t.

I’d heard and read so many good things about it, and the seal of approval from the young person at the concession stand who waited on me was just one more piece of encouragement before I walked home and pressed the start button to watch it on my laptop.

Later, I took a nap, waking after a nightmare that placed me back in the house where my nightmares began in childhood, then time-warping me to be dreaming that I was simultaneously in my bedroom in the house where they continued in my teens. Death, or the presumed presence of some scary monster intent on bringing it about, is one of the dominant themes. It had at least a cameo in this nightmare.

So, that’s how it’s going to be, I thought, not yet to sundown on the first vacation day.

There’s no good place for me to go with this to put a bow on this post, and that’s OK. I have no illusions that any of my worries are behind me, nor do I think my brain will know how to act without social media for at least a few weeks. More than once I found myself swiping over to check out apps that are no longer on my phone. I laughed. I laughed, right? Yeah, laughed.

It’s risky, I know, to disconnect from thousands of friends, strangers and in-betweens who were in my networks, but there are things I want to solve, things I need to solve, and there’s not a lot of time left for figuring them out. The last time I had this much available time to exist in the world without spending hours each week at a computer talking with others? It wasn’t from 2009 to the present, when I was regularly on Twitter, then eventually Facebook and Instagram. It wasn’t from 2002 to 2011, when I spent a lot of time on professional networking sites. It wasn’t from 1997 to 2002 and beyond, when I was a regular on AOL and in its chatrooms. Before that, I was working full time, going to school full time and married. Before that, I traded correspondence for two years with pen pals, the old-fashioned kind, people in Canada, England, France, Japan and the Netherlands. I married one of them.

All these years later, she and I chat almost daily on a secure messaging app. So instead of waiting a week or two for a response, we wait a few seconds or minutes. Surreal, and a lovely second act for which I am grateful.

As I said at the beginning of this week, you have to scroll all the way back to the early ’80s to find a time when I was moving through the world the way we did before these electronic connections were ubiquitous and almost impossible to imagine living without. I think I’m overdue for some wandering-in-the-woods time. Metaphorically speaking. And for some growth.

Love and thanks to Barbie for helping me ease into it and for reassuring me that I’m not alone with these heavy existential thoughts.

“Spoiler alert” image by karen roach via Shutterstock.