Business as Usual
Stream of conscious thoughts on grieving in the day and age of social media
Note: written on 28 October 2023
Nearly every day for the last couple of months I’ve deleted Instagram - and then redownload it later on in the day. Because let’s be honest- those time limits really don’t hold my thumb back from pushing ignore.
A couple of days ago, a mass shooting occurred only 30 miles away in my home of Maine. When I went onto social media, nearly every business and friend had posted something along the same lines their thoughts and prayers, their drive for gun regulation accompanied by a state of Maine logo with a heart in the town of Lewiston, where the shootings occurred. What added to the overall angst of the situation was what unfolded in the couple of days post shooting, while the police and wardens scoured the state in search of the suspect.
I remember just not even having time to process my own thoughts - everything happened so fast- family was calling me in the middle of the night to see if I was okay, friends in Europe were messaging me after seeing Maine on the news, everyone everywhere had an opinion. We were all in shock and grieving on our own timelines.
My office was empty the day after due to enforced lockdowns and school closures, leaving coworkers to stay at home with their kids. Yet work still needed to get done, billables had to be met and I still had my Friday deadlines. Business as usual.
After the first day of seeing a surplus of the same Instagram stories, I deleted the app once again. I turned on NPR and the first story was about the current deaths counts in Gaza. There was no escaping the world’s crises. I shut off the radio because today I just needed to try to give my brain and heart time to breathe.
3 days after the shooting, they found the suspect in an old place of business with an inflicted gunshot wound or so the news states as of a couple hours ago.
Yet I still haven’t redownloaded Instagram.
While retraining my thumb-muscle-memory to navigate to something else besides Instagram, I opened up Substack.
I fortunately came across Anna Brones’s latest newsletter which could not have been more appropriate for my sea of thoughts. She shared a quote from Rose Spinks’ piece titled “How to be online right now”:
“I think a lot of us are grappling with this relatively new expectation: That to know about what’s going on in the world means to publicly state nuanced opinions about events as they unfold.”
And wow - this was the exact sort of writing I needed to fill the voids in my brain which felt to be spinning with thoughts like
“I’m going on with my work day as usual while a mass murderer is on the loose, is this normal?”
“If I feel numb, does that mean I don’t possess any empathy?”
“When Sandy Hook happened in 2012 you sobbed with your high school classmates while working on the broadcasting team. You’re not crying now, so you must not care anymore.”
“Am I just desensitized?”
Times have been hard recently and social media has weaved into our lives to feel as if it’s always been here. Yet the news is so fast that I feel forced to be over something just as fast as an Instagram fad. The news stories will diminish covering these events, a new tragedy will arise which will hold the public’s attention for a couple of days and this cycle will just go round and round and round. Business as usual.
So today instead of just sharing an Instagram story with my thoughts and prayers, I sat on the porch and sipped my coffee on an unseasonably warm late October day - babbling about all things on my mind. And damn, it feels pretty good. Just to finally process what’s going on in my head instead of simply distracting myself via the world of short form entertainment.
There is no grand morale of the story from this babble - just a nice reminder to me that long-form processing can be healthy and that to have the privilege to sit and process is something I should never take for granted.
Also after this word vomit cleanse, some of the anxiety dissipated and my partner, Hayden and I went out for a canoe paddle on Moose Pond behind the house. A 70+ degree day in late October is certainly concerning in lieu of climate change in New England, however I still wanted to take advantage of a late season paddle.
We paddled out to a sandbar below our frequently visited bald eagle nest. The lake was quiet with most boats long-removed for the season. The just-past-peak foliage on pleasant mountain loomed over us making everything feel more majestic.
We ended up anchoring in the sandbar and waded out to the edges of the sandbar, me in my underwear and Hayden with his fishing rod. To my sheer surprise on my third cast I caught a decent size yellow perch and Hayden followed it up catching a young small mouth bass.
A bald eagle flew overhead on a hunt for its next meal and two loons came within ~25 ft of our canoe. I didn’t even recognize them at first due to their molting feathers. This was the first time I’ve approached a loon on the lake late in the season after they’ve traded out their striking white and black plumage for their gray and white winter plumage.
Mount Washington revealed itself in its fresh coat of snow and soon the loons will leave us for the winter. All things cyclical.
Happy to witness some of nature’s longer format transitions. Nature as usual.