I am only writing today to avoid doomscrolling on social media.

Writing is one of the things on my mental list called, “Do This Instead of Watching Thousands of Facebook Reels and Reading Horrific News Stories”.

The other things on this list include practicing your Beethoven and scales on the piano, painting, taking pictures of family, watching international films, staring at a wall, reading books by Wendell Berry and Ocean Vuong and Hanif Abdurraquib, shoveling snow, going on long walks of hopeful despair, loading and unloading the dishwasher, listening to Emmylou Harris and Jon Batiste and Queen, taking a nap, sending memes to friends in another state, taking another nap, watching basketball and football and yes, even the reruns, seeing if you can jump high enough to touch the nine-and-a-half-foot ceiling in the living room, taking out the trash, folding clothes, reading Anne Lamott’s substack, Googling doctoral programs, eating the same Greek lime yogurt everyday for breakfast, spiking your egg nog and hot chocolate for a little razzle dazzle, playing Wordle, eating sharp cheddar cheese, making weird faces at your nephew, writing more lists, drinking too many mugs of Earl Grey tea, being selectively mute, going to the gym, thinking about drinking water, watching the neighbor’s Golden Retriever bound in the snow, wandering around downtown, and listening to “No Other Love” by Jo Stafford on repeat until it becomes the soundtrack of your life. 

Reading this list aloud makes me feel self-conscious because it sounds like I am competing against my neighbors, as if I am trying to tell them that I am better at avoiding social media than they are. I am not competing against them. In fact, they can take this essay as a confession of gazing at my blue, glowy iPhone screen to experience just one more dopamine hit. (Just one more, I promise myself). I am just as stuck in this demented loop as most people are. I am grateful that writing releases me from the loop, even if just momentarily.

I am also grateful that writing helps me to resist perfectionism. I was almost going to stop writing this essay because I was thinking about how the people who read it will judge it for being too messy and too disorganized. These judgments, I have discovered, are usually my own. Other people are usually kinder than my brain. And I am usually competing against my past work. (This essay must be better than the one you already published or else you have failed, I tell myself).

This right here is yet another example of how social media gets in the way of enjoying art only because art is beautiful. The pressure to perform, to reach a certain standard – an often unattainable standard – ruins the act of simply getting words on a page, releasing your ideas into the wild blue yonder. When I write, I constantly fight with the worry that the way I organize my words on the page or the tone of my prose does not measure up to other people’s standards. People who I have never even met before. People who might not even write on a regular basis.

I am comforted by Anne Lamott’s classic book about writing, Bird by Bird, in which Lamott teaches her readers how to resist perfectionism. She wrote, “I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.” But I always die, no matter what I write. Because maybe, each word I tediously put down represents a miniscule piece of my life’s formational puzzle.

When I have the courage to put one word down, I also become courageous enough to put one more foot in front of the other to see where I land. To see if I have crossed the muddy waters or discovered new territory. Does new territory mean I must lose the old territory? Does gaining a new life mean I must lose my old life? Oftentimes, the new territory I stumble upon is the realization that if I try too hard to be self-effacing and wonderful, then I am really not living well, or being myself. When I try too hard, it’s like I am trying to control another writer’s body and mind. I want them to write for me. I want them to do the work. I want their voice instead of mine. It is an abstract kind of plagiarism, a bad case of Writer’s Limerence that causes my brain to spin and my body to clam up. Then suddenly, I have died and it’s not in the way that I wanted to because I never learned anything about myself or my neighbors in the process. 

Writing a list of things to do is a good way to find new life because it resists perfectionism and reveals things that you might not know about yourself or your neighbors. Lists can be re-written and discarded and they are, to use Anne Lamott’s words again, the best kind of “shitty first drafts.” Lists have the ritualistic power to redeem old, broken lives. Lists show that life can be more beautiful than scrolling on the internet because they represent what is real about who you are and who you are becoming. And I believe that becoming who you are makes life worth living. 

Header photo by Barnabas Davoti on Unsplash
Piano keyboard photo by Clare Tallamy on Unsplash