me spiritual. I haven’t ascended and I’m not enlightened. I’m no better than anyone else (if anything, I just require more help). But what the practice gives me is a chance of staying on the planet. When I meditate, I go from being a 96% impulsive and self-obsessed person to a 92% impulsive and self-obsessed person. That 4% keeps me alive.
It’s like every morning I access this template for pause in my brain. Then, as I go about my day and the voices start up again, I have a frame of reference that these voices might not be the whole truth. They may feel completely true, but there is also a memory of quiet beneath them, which shows that they maybe aren’t giving me the full picture of reality. They might be lying about me being a total piece of shit.
But who really wants to sit quietly and be still with the voices? I certainly don’t. Sometimes I’ll go without meditation for a few days, because I’m having a really good time running my life on self-will and I don’t want god, silence, or the space for reflection to piss on my party. Like, I don’t want to see what I’m doing. I don’t want to see that I’m about to make a mess. The committee is like: You’re killin’ it! Don’t stop! But inevitably, I always crash and return to my meditation practice again.
There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead. If it can’t kill me, it’ll settle for seeing me miserable. It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself. I don’t know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I’m just wired that way. But it’s cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live. I don’t have scientific proof of its existence, and I don’t need it. I’m still alive. So I know it’s there.
I Took the Internet Addiction Quiz and I Won
HOW ARE MY FEELINGS NOT going to kill me? The Internet is going to save me from my feelings. But what is going to save me from the Internet? I am dopamine’s girl. I am a puppy for attention from imaginary people. I am lonely among real human beings and would rather be on my phone than engage with reality.
The Internet has given me the dopamine, attention, amplification, connection, and escape I seek. It has also distracted me, disappointed me, paralyzed me, and catalyzed a false sense of self. The Internet has enhanced my taste for isolation. It has increased my solipsism and made me even more incapable of coping with reality.
Reality was never my first choice. I like that I can be somebody else on the Internet. I like that I can present one facet of myself and embody that. I don’t have to live in a body on the Internet. It’s so much easier to present an illusion of oneself than to contain multitudes. Illusion is easier than flesh. I like that other people can be a hologram version of themselves on the Internet, too. I like tweets and nudes, romantic emails, avatars and dick pics. I like that I get to fill in the blanks. Who are you? I’ll decide.
I’ve long thought that the word illusion meant a better version of reality. But recently, after being forced to mourn a series of illusions—most of them romantic, each of them Internet in origin—I looked up the word illusion in the dictionary. I was surprised to discover that the word illusion actually means “something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.” So, an illusion is not inherently a better version of reality. An illusion is a false version of reality. An illusion is a lie.
This discovery has changed the nature of my relationship with illusion. I feel like I am mourning the death of a whole way of seeing the world. I see more clearly now. I see myself trying to patch a hole inside me that cannot be patched by anything external. I am cobbling together the dregs of what I can still use to get high into a shitty dopamine party. That party is the Internet.
But is my obsession with the Internet actually an addiction? I’ve decided to answer that question by taking a quiz from Psych Central called “Are You Addicted to the Internet?” While the quiz is multiple choice, my relationship with the