The Naked Lunch or Forgetting Facebook Part II

“I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-seven, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened immune system and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness. . . .” — William S. Burroughs, sort of.

Quitting Facebook was hard. Not harder than I thought it would be but hard in the way that becoming disconnected from a community is hard. I’ve been off since January with only short spurts of reconnecting for work purposes or hearing my partner read me comments from her feed at night.

Also, I have a lot of residual anger leftover from January 6th and November 2016-November 2020. Anger that emerged from discovering the racist, mysogonistic underpinnings of people I’d called friends, dined with, loved and trusted for decades. To watch the hatred emerge slowly over four years on a social media platform was more painful than I ever admitted to myself, and something that feels like it has all the hallmark signs of trauma.

Enough snowflake for now.

Getting off Facebook was very similar to what Burroughs did getting off of heroin in “The Naked Lunch,” but with less of the romance with which I read that book in my twenties.

I miss people but more dearly than you can imagine. I miss who I thought they were. Before the curtain was pulled back to reveal something much worse than ruby slippers and the knowledge that I can never go home no matter how many times I click the heels together.