Digital Detox - The Surprising Horrors

Caveat emptor: I had to keep up with social media this past week for work. Five days a week, I'm on Instagram, posting a daily Insta, scrolling, liking, following, and trying to grow followers.  (It's a new responsibility, and I kind of actually love it? Is it strange to mildly loathe self-Instagramming, but love it when you're doing it for someone else??)

Back to the matter at hand:

Digital detoxification!

I did it, I really did. Probably a bit too much? I took a week off of blogging, which got me warmed up for the full-press detox. 

I took notes. I made a list: 

read; write; walk; garden

And here's what happened: 

✅ Reading

I dug right in to George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which I had ordered after listening to him speak at the virtual PEN World Voices Festival. It had been sitting on my nightstand in its violet dust jacket for a couple weeks, and the detox gave me the extra hours and bandwidth to get lost in his lectures on 19th-century Russian short stories. It was pretty blissful, to sit in bed or in a chair in my garden, and have the permission of the digital detox to just get swept up in Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Some of Saunders' essays I had heard before--there's this one video, with bizarrely excellent production values, that makes the rounds in creative-writing classrooms: 

I'll admit that I was slightly disappointed when some of the book's lectures used the text of the above video verbatim--I don't think this is surprising, because it's great advice, so why not include it in a craft book? 

Something about the verbatim part stuck with me. Maybe because I was such a fan of the video. 

So when the detox ended, I sleuthed around a bit, and found Jennifer Colville's essay on studying at Syracuse in the 90s. 

Whoa. 

That's a story for another blog post, as a millennial Chekhov might say, but here it is: 

The salad! Wait till you get to the salad. 

✅ Writing

I got my head back into a story that has been frustrating and eluding me--the truth and mystery of the story (the story part of the story) wasn't quite coming together. So I started writing scenes and blocks of scenes in longhand. Images, flashes. And where it might/should end. I did this at night, when I probably would have been doom-scrolling or reading about the Royal Family's latest firestorm. So that's good! 

✅-ish Walking

It was kind of really hot this week, so walking--not so much. (Unless forgetting your grocery list and doing circles around a Costco counts.) And blueberry picking. I did that with my daughter and now we have blueberries for days (months, actually, in the freezer). Made blueberry pancakes with extra blueberries. And then got back on my exercise bike. 

✅ Gardening

I legitimately gardened. Cleaned up my rangy tomatoes. Planted hurricane-season seeds (eggplant, Thai basil, green beans, asparagus beans, okra, sunflowers). Added much-needed soil post-erosion. And witnessed the harrowing realities of nature! Who knew that wasps prey on harmless caterpillars? Not I, before this week. I had a lovely phalanx of blue swallowtail caterpillars on my dill--it was charming!--until wasps found them and systematically destroyed them, caterpillar by caterpillar. I tried to save them, taking them to a milkweed plant in another part of my garden, and then waited with a hose, JET setting on, for a fraught hour. But then I had to leave the house. I had to.  

A goner, my friends.

When I came back, no more caterpillars. 😱

Finis. 

(It was admittedly hard to stick with the detox that day, and not rush to look up that particular natural horror on my phone.) 

Ah, the circle of life! 

It's pretty brutal, I mean, even in an herb garden.