Doom Scroll

I spent another day doom-scrolling TikTok today.

Down sick with “super allergies” that have developed in the 4 years since a global pandemic shut down an entire planet for just long enough for all of us to see how broken the machine has always been... Then immediately refusing to fix it. 

I’m watching all the ways the world is a wonderful terrible place in 25 second increments in an app where giving a creator a full 60 seconds of our time is an act of most profound support. 

Consuming the lives of other people suffering in the worst possible ways like trauma tourism, and chasing that shot with a clip of a singing cat to make it go down easier. 

Young girls, teach me about makeup in a warped waterfall of wisdom that runs upstream to their elders that only ever knew rosy pink cheeks and bluest eyeshadows at their age.

I learn about all the ways I’ve never had a unique experience in my entire life, but the communal reality of that is a deepest comfort. 

Nameless artists singing songs that separate my soul from my person for the briefest of moments, before returning it home with a fresh wound dressing to get me through another day.

The moments of my staved depression tick off the clock with the falling numbers of a screen battery, and I wonder if I’ve tasted water today. Or fresh air. 

Have my eyes been given rest in any light that wasn’t artificial? 

A beautiful moment of mother and daughter graces my screen for a full three minutes, while mother does daughter’s hair and whispers sweet affirmations into their reflections, and daughter is given all of the autonomy of choice that I never once knew as a child. 

I watch their bond, so authentically effortless. And I turn off my phone to grieve. 

For my inner child whose only beautiful attribute spoken aloud by strangers and family alike were my father’s blue eyes, so as to avoid mentioning my too-thick thighs, my too-unwieldy hair, my too-dirty face, my ill-fitting thriftstore clothes; leftover from last year. 

I wonder what it might have felt like to have ever been called beautiful. 

I grieve. 

I grieve for the mother whose own mother didn’t have the words either.

And I grieve that maybe the kindest thing I ever did for my daughter… Was refuse to have any more children for risk of ever birthing her. 

And letting this die with me.