Edvard Munch - "Weeping Nude" (1919)
for, dear God,
we too are down here
in such darkness.
— Mary Oliver, from "Evening Star"
Rachel's Song, by Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore
Finished my shawl overnight. I stayed up way too late, but I wanted to complete it. I like the colors! They remind me of a unicorn or a little girl's birthday cake. It's hard to believe this shawl is made of thousands of stitches created by my own hands.
"Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld"
"Adapting begins with seeing the internet for what it actually is — not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs. It’s not a physical place, but it’s no less real. Anyone who came of age online knows the feeling of crossing that threshold: When you log on, time runs differently, the body slips away, and, as one early inhabitant put it, “the selves that don’t have bodies” step forward.
Our earliest language about the internet seemed to understand its nature best. The central question of cyberspace has always been one of navigation. How do we move through this world while remaining human? What do we bring back from our travels? What bargains do we strike unknowingly? And how do we step back into the world of bodies when part of us would rather remain online?"*******
"The internet is a place crowded with uncanny entities and enchantments. Sometimes these enchantments reach back into our physical world. If we hope to travel wisely, the old instructions still apply: mark the threshold, remember that time moves differently there and know that every gift from the otherworld carries a price.
Above all, keep part of yourself rooted in the real world — grounded, embodied and tethered to other people."
I find this article fascinating and thought-provoking. Maybe because, for a long time now, I've grappled with the slipperiness and destabilization of the internet and what it's doing not only to my life but to all of our lives. And yet the internet itself is so vast that we are not all experiencing the same terrain when we log on to it. It doesn't offer one portal to one world but infinite portals to multitudinous worlds, each filled with tantalizing experiences that reality cannot provide.
I like the article's reframing of internet usage from addiction to enchantment. When I finally left Instagram in December 2025, I described it as breaking a spell, leaving a trance-like state, no longer being hypnotized by the amorphous world on my screen.
For me, the most seductive thing about the internet has always been the disembodiment of it. I have always wanted to escape my body. I don't think I've lived a day on this earth in which I felt at home inside myself or felt seen by others. My body is large, it takes up space, it has been denigrated and judged, it has been used as justification for my own dehumanization.
When I got online around 2010 by joining Facebook, and later on Tumblr, I felt such a freedom. I could blog about my life and no one could see me. They could evaluate my worth based on something other than my weight. Maybe that's what made the podcast so seductive as well. It's why I avoided using a real profile picture for a long time and didn't want to post selfies. I intuitively knew that, once I was seen, I would be treated differently. And I was right.
The thing is, we can't ever truly escape the body. I thought I could go online and be someone else, or be more myself. I thought I could find visibility, connection, and all the things I lacked in my everyday life. But not only is the internet an "otherworld" or a "fairyland" as the article calls it, it's also a haunted space filled with phantoms and ghosts. It makes people disposable to one another. Nothing ever feels fully real. That's why you can't make a home in it.
I agree with the article that to navigate the "otherworld" of the internet means being an explorer who understands what is real and what is not, and it means leaving breadcrumbs for yourself so that you can find your way back home. Remember the tangible world. Remember the fragile, mortal body. Remember your true north.