While walking home recently, I was having a panic attack. It was one of many I had after a shooting in my hometown, and days spent obsessively searching “trump dayton visit” on Twitter had fried my brain and body. Beyond running those searches, everything else felt impossible; I kept compulsively doing them despite how the results made me feel.
In between texting my boyfriend to ask if he needed anything from the shop and googling “how many panic attacks is too many” and “panic attacks vs nervous breakdown”, a friend messaged me an article from Mother Jones – a group interview with writers Ashley Feinberg, Jenny Odell, Mike Isaac, and Jia Tolentino. In the piece, headlined “’This Shithole Made Me’: 4 Extremely Online Writers on How the Internet Broke Our Brains and How We Can Unbreak Them”, the writers talked about their fantasies of logging off forever, and cutting their most toxic internet habit: spending time on Twitter.
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