When I announced my marriage to the blogger Driftglass, a well-meaning acquaintance said, "Bloggers should never marry bloggers! One of you should be a doctor, or else you'll starve!" That said, I'm so grateful to have someone in my life who is both politically aware and maritally
sensitive enough to know that look I get when it is absolutely essential to my mental health that I be pulled off of social media.
You may know those moments, too. The point at which if you read one more Facebook post complaining about "those people on food stamps" you might just flip out. Or a post where you or someone you care about shares a personal struggle with rape or racists or other oppressors, and a commenter immediately replies, "links please."
image above from Tumblr
My husband knows that look. The look that says I might cry or scream or worst of all, withdraw into a ball of capital H "Hopeless."
The look that says it is time to get off of social media.
Driftglass has a phrase of art, SNOT, which stands for "Some Nobody on Twitter." It's particularly helpful to notice when the person who is most offensive is an egg who has many thousand more offensive tweets than they have followers. Consider the source. They are the social media equivalent of boogers. There's not much point in letting Some Nobody on Twitter ruin even a moment of your waking hours.
I love Twitter. Most of my interactions are with hilarious people who actually de-stress me. But sometimes politics gets in the way of the laughter.
The primary season is particularly hard. Not only because we're having a family fight between the #FeelTheBern-ers and the #ImWithHer-ers. We have people on both sides of that here on staff at C&L, and the policy here is C&L the blog supports the Democratic nominee once that person is selected.
I've been through enough primary seasons (got my feet wet with Kennedy '80) to know how to withdraw from those battles.
It's harder when I think about what might happen if any Republican wins the White House, let alone Donald Drumpf. I don't often go there, but there are moments when the Talking Heads and their evergreen efforts to turn an election into a horse-race farce distracts and mesmerizes me.
image above from Instagram
"Is it time to get off social media?" says my husband. Well, is it?
Is anyone else out there suffering, even occasionally, from Trump Anxiety?
