We are junkies for the things that kill us

an essay on looking for life in all the wrong places

Hi! Quick note: Did you see that you’re invited to a POETRY JAM & SLAM series? Slots are beginning to fill up and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see some of your wonderful faces in ‘person.’ The first is on Thursday, 2/15 @ 8 PM (EST). COME! oh and psssss… it’s free for paid subscribers!

I could not be more kindred to Paul than when he writes:^“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).

I hate my middle-of-the-night email checks. But I still do them.

We are junkies for the things that kill us.

Ask me how I know?

In the middle of the night, when I get up to feed Alden, I sit in the rocker in the dark and I—who am holding a beautiful baby, who am sitting in a warm home, who am wearing fuzzy purple Bombas slippers so my feet needn’t have a moment of chilliness—I am a lamb being led to slaughter as my thoughts spin to the imaginary worlds of influence and relevance and all the other things the blue screens of the world say are essential for life.

And after his belly is rounded with the miracle of milk and I kiss his cheeks [so full that they fill in the parted valley of my lips, enough to touch my teeth], I leave him to suckle his pacifier in soft, satisfied quietude while I pad to our bedroom, climb beneath the covers, and hang over the edge of the bed so that the light from my phone won’t wake my husband, who reaches in his sleep for me.

including this picture so you can get a feel for the cheeks I’m talking about

My elbow and shoulder ache from propping myself up like this, and I narrow my eyes to the tiniest squints to absorb less of the light. I know it will interrupt my dreams, and I wish that I lived in a world far away from my phone, where it was mute and dead and therefore unable to talk to me, to be so loud in my mind even when it’s silent on the bedside table.

I am aware that it is destroying my peace to check my email and my socials at 2:42 A.M. Vividly aware, even. And yet I do it, night after night, a compulsion that pulls me from the physical warmth of our flannel sheets into the make-believe world of information and instant feedback.