Hooked again. I'm almost a year free from gambling and for the last two weeks I've been putting myself through a cycle of hits and losses that finally brought me to buzzed days and sleepless nights---a lot like those of my gambling years. I wasn't in a casino. I wasn't betting money. I sat at my computer at my old roll-top desk. I bet my time and too much of my self-worth.
Friends and family had asked me to go on Facebook for a couple years. I resisted. There was something eerie about the phenomenon, something that reminded me too much of Cypher saying to the Agent, "You know I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?" He bites into the steak. "Ignorance is bliss."
I know too how susceptible I am to wanting to feel seen. I've always been that way, but as I became older, then old, I learned the truth of Susan Sontag's wisdom on aging: Old women are invisible. I didn't want to use Facebook to shore up my self-worth.
Finally, I succumbed. I was told that my books need the exposure, that I could generate fans for their pages. I used that as an excuse. In truth there were men from my past I wanted to find, moments I wanted to relive. There was the possibility of finding messages and requests for connection. There was a way to not be quite as lonely as I often am. There was a way, in the mini-second of a click, to be visible.
For a few days, I checked my pages a few times a day, then hourly, then sometimes every five minutes. My work tool is my computer. My work often brings ferocious anxiety and access to an emptiness that every addict wants to out-run, an emptiness that is also the Source of my writing. Any distraction is a welcome distraction.
Last night, I commented on someone's Facebook post and realized that I didn't really care about what they had written or my own comment. I realized that I had a magazine story on women's gambling addiction to write. And a compelling book to read. And, I had been feeling the stirrings of my own next book.
My son has been camping with me on his way to Japan. He was on his computer at the other desk. "Hey," I said, "something's bugging me about Facebook." He laughed. He knows his addict mother. "Well, you don't suppose it's because you're on it for hours?"
"You don't use it much," I said.
"I don't really like it," he said. "It seems to me that people who are on a lot are denying a couple things. They're making time not exist - the speed of it, the instant back and forth. And, they're denying that people grow apart."
I turned back to the computer. I thought of how I always have to fight to let go of what once felt good; how I once believed that certain loves were eternal; how I ache for my old home, my old town, the raw Old West I was lucky to come into in 1985. And I thought of the way that finally letting go of what no longer lives has always released me into now, into this polished silver moonlight falling on this lilac bush outside my window, my son's teasing smile, the young black cat curled in my lap. I remembered a woman from one of my gambling support groups. She'd embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars and quit only when she was caught. I faced that I was now embezzling not my money, but my time and pleasure in the three-dimensional, multi-sensory world---and I didn't want to wait till I was caught to quit.
I opened Facebook, clicked on my page and wrote that I would no longer use Facebook for personal communication. "If you want to be in touch, you can email me at xxxxxxxxxxx." I can't remember what else I wrote. I'd have to go back to my page to see---and I know that would be nothing but the ploy of a chronic user. That's the nature of addiction. That's the nature of Cypher's steak.
