As you may (or may not) have noticed, I've been on a bit of a hiatus from the blog lately. I recently lost my job in circumstances I'm not yet ready to discuss, and so I've been at a loss as to what to divulge here, even if, as with most of what I write on Insomnia Haiku, I share very little that's personal or work-related or embarrassing (unless it's funny, in which case "embarrassing" works out like gangbusters).
Like I said before, the Internet is like one giant game of Telephone. By that, I mean anything you say can be picked up, dissected, distorted, misused. You could say that this is the byproduct of the scary new Internet world in which we live -- but it's mostly our own fault. How much of our lives do we guard as truly private, and "offline," as it were? Instead of keeping diaries for ourselves alone, we write blogs that can be read by anyone, anywhere. Instead of having intimate conversations with our friends, we text, Facebook, Twitter and email.
For people such as I who are private bordering on shy, and who don't particularly enjoy talking on the phone (thank you online ordering!), the rise of the digital age can seem like a boon. We can retreat further into ourselves while somehow being more connected than we ever were before. Wow, you mean I can just write stuff and not interact with anyone I don't know? Score. But we forget, don't we? Words have power -- power at the hands of the writer, which then transforms into power held by the reader and interpreter. Once we let those words go, they spring out into the world like children; and for all our care and worry and thought, we have little to no control over what the world will make of them, or what they will, in the eyes of strangers, ultimately become.
But words, to quote the Bee Gees song, are all I have, and so I will do my best to keep writing here even if, in some ways, I can't say much of anything. I know you're all used to that already. In fact, I'm sure four of you six readers are scratching your heads having no idea what I'm going on about ... well, I don't understand what I'm going on about half the time anyway, so welcome to my world.
At any rate, since leaving my job I've been trying hard to unplug, which is a novel concept for me. The first weekend, as I lay on my couch, I kept glancing over to my coffee table, expecting to see my Blackberry with its red light blinking. My fingers twitched for the device that was no longer there. I was glad not to have to leap to respond to every late-night query and request and breaking news story, but at the same time, I felt a little lost otherwise.
And while being on constant work alert has become a fact of existence -- even a point of pride -- for me, it is also, I have come to realize, not healthy. It's alarmingly not healthy, in fact. Sure, there's something of a thrill to being that energized all the time, that tuned in ... but what does it get you, in the end? Does it truly fulfill you, or does it merely fulfill in you some narcissistic desire to feel necessary and important? I'm starting to suspect the latter. People out in the world have lives, or so I hear, that don't revolve around a blinking Blackberry. And so, turning the page, I am embarking on a quest to try to find one.
