No woman is an island

But Instagram made me feel like I was trapped on one forever

There are many things I was told I would become after active cancer treatment. Kinder, more patient, more grateful, contemplative, loving, caring. Thanks to hormone blockers, the recent death of a friend from cancer and a stressful time at work, I am none of those things. Cancer has made me angrier, more aggressive, and much less patient. The capacity to wait in line for everything, from a bagel to a concert, a daily feature of Bay Area life, is absolutely lost.

But I am much more decisive. Like most people who tend to ruminate, it used to take me weeks, months and sometimes years to make a choice. PhD or not? Years. Get married or not? Years. Now that it’s unclear how much time I have left, decisions come much more swiftly.

I quit my Instagram author profile. Of all the social media apps that are bad for your self image after cancer, let’s move that one up to #1. All of the people with their long shiny hair and their perfect boobs laughing with salad and snapping photos of their international vacations, their #sponcon and their seemingly endless buckets of money that fund the same platform that has let child abuse run rampant and has contributed to the rise in teen suicide? Yes. Fuck off.

And this notion that Instagram helps readers get to know authors and in turn helps us sell more books? Comical at best, pathetic in reality. Every author who told me Instagram helped them build a “ real community” was also a thin, conventionally attractive white woman who seemingly never went to work. Lucky them, I guess.

How do you have a healthy relationship with social media in the midst of a catastrophic illness? There is either oversharing — photos of people crying in doctor’s offices and zooming in on the contents of their toilets after a chemo puke — or there is the passivity forced on you by illness.

Cancer turns you from a participant into a witness of other people’s lives. Because you’re sick, you can’t be part of everyone’s carefully edited versions of reality, and the parties, weddings, vacations and holidays you’re not allowed to participate in turn into a horror show. Even now when my health is kind of/sort of decent (knock wood, Hail Mary, take more pills, etc), seeing pictures of everyone’s fun reminds me of nothing other than the terrible year I spent in treatment.

There’s another layer to this that I’m still struggling to figure out, and that’s the feeling that when I do spend time with other people, many of whom saw me in the months when I looked like Gollum, I’m not actually there. It’s not me enjoying food, hearing music, or having a good chat, but some butchered, instant-ramen-haired, bloated version of myself. I used to be present in moments with other people; now it’s me and cancer who arrive at the restaurant, the movie or the coffee shop, and cancer is a terrible companion. Seeing pictures of my former life just pushes gravel into the wound and rubs it in until it starts bleeding again.

I don’t know what a “healthy” relationship with social media looks like any more, because, frankly, I never had one in the first place. The reason I don’t drink is because if I have one beer, I have six, and if I go on Twitter or Instagram, I can’t just scroll for five minutes. It turns into self punishing hours, and those hours make me feel worse and worse about myself and the world with every passing minute, the algorithm feeding my worst insecurities the exact shiny and happy or dark and depressing content that makes me question why anyone would want to spend time with me, read my work, live on this planet, breathe in or out.

On the other side of that is the isolation of cutting off most information about how people are doing. When I left Facebook during the pandemic, it was because the conspiracy theories and rampant panic and paranoia were too much to take. But Facebook is also where people go to let you know who’s died, who’s sick, who got laid off, who moved, etc. News lags for me now. Sometimes I’m texting a friend unaware they’re experiencing a major tragedy. Sometimes I’m having coffee with someone not knowing they’ve gotten a divorce.

At some point, we lost the capacity to share our lives with one another without these platforms, and as a writer, that worries me. As a human being, it makes me deeply sad, even as I’m working to determine whether I can use these apps at all without needing an Ativan afterwards. When I told people I had cancer, I did it through emails and texts, one ring of people at a time. By the time I posted a selfie of my bald head, I was six months into treatment, and later, I went back and deleted it. Because, someday, if this disease takes me out, that’s not the version of myself I want people to remember.

This, as it turns out, is much closer. The version that writes, and thinks, and breathes ideas into words, in conversations, in teaching, in things I write. That’s the version I hope survives me, even beyond the lifespan of this platform, even after the pages of my books turn into dust. And she doesn’t belong to Silicon Valley, and she doesn’t exist in images. She might be a memory some day, but, hopefully, it will be a memory in words.