dispatches from the pandemic: why I left The feed

I am not naturally good at social media.

That is not a moral stance. Plenty of people use it well. Plenty of people build communities, careers, friendships, audiences, entire lives through those platforms. I understand the utility. I have used the utility.

But I also know what it does to me.

To explain that, I have to explain something ugly.

When I was seventeen, my mother was in a catastrophic car accident. She had been working two jobs, one during the day and one in the evening, trying to arrange her life so she could be present for her family in the margins. One day, with some time off, she went to garage sales, which is practically an Olympic sport in Southeast Missouri. On her way home, an eighteen-wheeler struck the driver’s side of her car.

The injuries were devastating.

She was in a coma for months. She was transferred from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis because the long-term care there was better. We spent weekends driving to see her. When she began to wake up, the extent of the damage became clearer. Her body had changed. Her brain had changed. The life my family had been living was gone.

There was a lawsuit connected to the accident. A settlement. Money placed in a medical trust for her long-term care.

Then came another fight.

Because of a subrogation clause in her health plan, the plan sought to recover medical costs from the money that had been set aside to care for her. The legal battle went on for years. We lost. Appealed. Lost again. Tried to take it higher. In August 2006, we learned there would be no relief from the Supreme Court.

One week later, my brother Jeremy, eighteen years old and two weeks into his deployment in Iraq, was killed.

There are moments in life when the whole structure gives way.

That was one of them.

Eventually, the legal story became a public story. Lawyers and advocates tried to put pressure on the company involved. My family appeared in news segments. We were written about. People asked about books, life rights, interviews. We traveled. We told the story.

And then the internet did what the internet does.

Comment sections filled with strangers explaining why we were wrong, greedy, un-American, dishonest, undeserving. People who knew nothing about us found moral certainty quickly. Some major public figures talked about families like mine as if we were villains in a story they had already decided how to tell.

Messages came in. Friend requests came in. Insults came in.

I changed my name on social media just to make myself harder to find.

Eventually, the company dropped its claim to the remaining money, while preserving the legal precedent it wanted. The public pressure had worked, at least in the narrow sense.

But the damage had already been done.

People from our hometown, some of whom had ostensibly lined the roads for my brother’s funeral, made it clear that support has limits once money, politics, and opinion enter the room.

A couple years later, my mother died.

The news appeared online. The insults returned.

Later still, on the anniversary of my brother’s death, I posted a picture of him online and went to bed. When I woke up, the image had gone widely visible. Many people responded with kindness. Many did not. Some said the photo was fake. Some said he deserved what happened because of the war.

That was the end for me.

I deleted everything.

Imgur. Reddit. Instagram. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Whatever else I had. I did not make a clean digital wellness choice. I fled a burning building.

The strange thing about social media is that it promises connection while constantly proving how many people are willing to forget the humanity on the other side of the screen.

And I am not immune to the comparison machine either.

Even when the abuse is not direct, the platforms do something to my inner weather. I see people announcing promotions, launches, closings, partnerships, homes, cars, children, bodies, deals, lives. I know the posted life is not the whole life. Everyone knows that by now. But the body does not always process it that way.

The body sees a scoreboard.

The body sees proof that everyone else figured something out.

The body says, “You are behind.”

I do not want to spend my life arguing with a machine designed to make me feel unfinished.

That does not mean I want to disappear.

I am a writer. I want people to read what I write. I want my work to find its audience. I want collaborators, opportunities, conversation, community. I want the good parts of being findable without handing my nervous system to the feed every morning.

That is what a website is for.

A website is slower. Quieter. More intentional. It asks someone to come to you, not stumble across you between a promoted post and a stranger’s bad opinion. It can be a home instead of a hallway.

So that is where I am trying to put my work now.

Not because I am above social media.

Because I know where the trapdoors are.

I know how quickly a platform can turn grief into debate, memory into content, a family into a case study, a dead brother into an argument.

I have no interest in feeding that machine more than necessary.

I would rather write from a room I own.

Even if that room is digital.