Logging off/on/off again

A week in a farmhouse, friendships with animals, and trying to be "chill"

I didn’t publish a newsletter last week for the same reason I didn’t do anything: I had a real, genuine week off. I didn’t check Twitter, I set an Out of Office (I know! And I don’t even have an office!) and I only went on my phone at all to post a couple of photos, navigate around the Cotswolds, read, research local folklore, and reply to friends if I deemed it a non-stressful exchange. 

It was a perfect week. Karl, Bowie and I stayed in a nice farmhouse, went on lots of walks, saw cool nature, hung out with sheep, sat in a hot tub, and saw a couple of friends for the first time in months. We drove further west, added an extra night to the vacation spontaneously, and as much as possible, limited interference from the outside world. But the thing, unsurprisingly, that brought me the most Chill wasn’t necessarily avoiding responsibilities, but avoiding Twitter.

I know this, we all know this. We hate it but we’re chained to it, whether for work or promotion or connection or just for the jokes and feeling of inclusion. I am scared of just how much I need it  – when I was locked out for two days during the hack a couple of weeks ago, I worried that I mightn’t get back, that no matter how little I ever enjoy being on it, I need it, don’t know what my professional life would look like without the ease of sharing pieces or having conversations.

I’ve been constantly assessing my relationship to Twitter long before my week off. When I moved to London, I met someone at an event who told me that I both looked and acted exactly as I did online. At the time I laughed: like, duh, I am that person who’s online. It is me, just inside your phone. But then I started to meet (some) people I thought were cool online, finding gulfs between who I thought they were and the often mean, insecure, cruel people they actually were. The more time they spent online, the wider that gulf seemed to become.

Around that time, my mental health and burnout had a direct correlation to how much I used Twitter, as every single conversation revolved around sexual assault, but it was my job to stay involved and to read it. I couldn’t log off entirely, and I went Quite Insane. As soon as I could, I worked to remodel my relationship with it – to make sure I had a separate life and career, but also to treat it like a job. I try not to go on at night, at the weekends, on holiday. I have tricks, like moving the app to a different folder so that when my muscle memory leads me to refresh I’m forced to think: what the fuck am I doing?

Making sure I have a full and fulfilling a life offline is harder than it should be. It’s a conscious effort to keep up with friends who don’t use social media, to call family members, to go on walks in nature and read physical books and leave my phone in the locker at the gym. It’s hard to retrain your brain, weaning it off the constant assault of other people’s opinions, off getting annoyed and tweeting about it, over and over. I still find myself guilty, often, but the more I catch myself slipping the more I know I need to walk away.

I like the person I am offline more, like how calm and curious and interested in doing things she is, how far from being irritated. It isn’t easy to log off: the first day of trying to relax is hard, filling the quiet in your brain alone is hard. Reconnecting with things that actually bring you happiness gets harder the older you are. But after another day or two I found it surprisingly easy to just sit in the garden of the farmhouse, watching slugs and bats and sheep live their little lives. I noticed things I wouldn’t usually, was happy doing things I wouldn’t usually be, and found it easier to occupy my own skin.

My base level irritability got much lower: I had a slightly annoying conversation with my mother that made my blood boil in a way I hadn’t felt in a few days, and it blindsided me: I didn’t realise how relaxed I was until I wasn’t. Because I was in a position to do so, I threw my phone on the bed in a tantrum and walked over a mile to a stone circle in the rain.

While I was away, I read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, which is mostly (from my reading) about not doing nothing but redirecting your attention your attention to activities and causes that matter to you while finding a way to occupy a “third space”: not logging off entirely, not being terminally online, but finding a balance that keeps you connected without going insane. Now that I am home, and I have to speak to doctors and reply to editors and share work on Twitter and talk to friends, the actual work of logging off begins.

It’s easy to joke about hating Twitter but still using it obsessively, and it’s easy not to use it when you’re in a gorgeous renovated farmhouse with a hot tub and nothing to do every single day whatsoever. I thought constantly throughout my vacation about how I would maintain the level of chill that I had somehow, majestically, despite my anxious, neurotic, ADHD-addled brain achieved. I wanted to be able to not fill every second of my time, to let myself make new decisions and new connections and not always fill my brain with information and bad opinions.

On the fifth day, we drove to Cornwall, and I ran to the end of the world and took off all my clothes and tried to swim in the clear, beautiful sea in the rain before screaming at St Michael’s Mount and deciding not to dive in – it was fucking freezing. But when Karl suggested that we add on an extra night and sleep in a strange, three-room inn in Dartmoor so we had more time to do weird things like hang out with animals and trek to allegedly pixie-filled forests, I said yes. I was chill now, I was one with nature, I was spontaneous enough. We drove and we ran and we walked and we got our shoes muddy and I almost didn’t care. I had nothing to get home for.

Then I came home, and I logged on, and I cursed myself for giving in to it so quickly. Then I saw that someone who had treated me like shit had gone viral, and I logged off again. So long as I’m able to do that so easily without the ocean or pixies to distract me, I’ll feel like there’s a balance, like I’m the one in control. Maybe.

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