Stuck on the Cloud

Letting my mind wander is not as pleasant as it used to be.

It's not that I think about death, exactly. It's that, when the world is quiet, the futility of the person that I am becomes painfully clear.

But, as an adult, I miss my daydream time. It’s not exactly that I don’t have time to daydream. It's that, during the times I would daydream, I’m usually scrolling on a smartphone. Lately, this is my response to quiet moments, and it has depressingly little to do with not wanting to feel bored. It has everything to do with tamping down the thoughts that come to me in the moments when the noise of the world goes away.

For example, when trying to fall asleep; I have a vague recollection of that particular time in childhood as special, a nice break at the end of an over-scheduled day engineered by my parents and other all-powerful grown-ups, when I could let my mind wander until my eyes closed peacefully.

So, some nights, I say to myself: What would happen if I allowed myself to drift off, staring at the ceiling, like I used to do. Why don’t I do that anymore?

Then I try it. And I remember.

No sooner have I flicked off the light then my brain starts playing every wrong thing that has happened to me and by me in the last twenty years. The mass of all these memories together causes a wrenching, bone-deep regret that I can change nothing, and frustration that I will never be strong or savvy enough to deal with "everyone else" or "them" or "The World" or whatever vague adversarial concept is plaguing me in that particular moment, the personification of which would likely laugh itself silly with the knowledge of me growing purple with rage at the thought of anything it did.

And behind this, the siren song: this feeling would stop if you just picked up your phone.

At first I attributed this common experience to that most unhelpful of phenomena: that trying to make something occur, in this case, falling asleep, is what makes that very thing least likely. But I've found the same phenomenon during any moment devoid of sound: driving my car without the radio, for example, or on a walk without some podcast or audiobook playing in my ears. In that moment, every memory and feeling I push down during the course of an average busy day is released in a barrage of accusation concerning my ineffectuality as a person, against which I am powerless to do anything except cower, or cry, or grow tight with frustration.

But the answer is not to keep scrolling. Besides the feeling that we’ve all had of losing five hours of our finite life-time to something we can't remember, there’s the unpleasant, sightly bizarre feeling of resurfacing after you’ve spent a long time on a smartphone, when you pull yourself away to rejoin real life: everything looks a little grey. After living for so long inside the hyper-saturated colors of your screen while being effortlessly pulled along by consistent novelty, you have to re-learn how to live.

It's like floating on a cloud just above a large city. From your bird's eye view, you are all-powerful, all knowing. Navigating feels effortless and unrestrained. You can't really relate to the idiots on the ground, always taking their cars down unexpectedly-busy streets, or scurrying haplessly into dangerous alleys that, if they had your omniscience, they could have avoided entirely.

But when the cloud drops you in the middle of the city, you find the ground is uneven, and tall buildings surround you on all sides. At the same time, more painfully, you have to deal with the realization that, before the cloud, you used to navigate cities all the time, and how masterful and satisfying it felt to have such capability, and how could you have been so stupid to have lost it?

Regardless, the fact remains: I've always gone for walks. Long before I had headphones.

I can do it again.

Last night, I put my phone in another room to charge. Five minutes after turning off my light, I got up and retrieved it, lay down in the dark, and fell asleep with the blue tinge of the screen illuminating my big, stupid face.

I made it five minutes before getting back on my cloud.

Maybe next time will be better.